Quicksilver Bells
by Sabari
Summary: Darien and Hobbes are annoyed to find themselves working during the holidays when The Official assigns them to a kidnapping case.
1. Things Are Looking Bad for Santa

_Some maudlin dog loving sap in the early twentieth century wrote, "Some proverbs live because they are too true to die. Others endure because they have a smug sound and nobody has bothered to bury them."_

 _I always thought all the sappy, sentimental holiday greetings were the latter._

 _I've seen enough Christmas Specials to know that they are the easiest and cheapest thing in the world to produce because you don't have to write a script because every one of them is exactly the same when you get right down to it, and -if you buy your props after Christmas one year and use them to film next season's holiday special- you get great discounts. Also, people are legally obligated to watch Christmas Specials nonstop for the entire month of December, and parts of November and January, so you have a guaranteed audience. And you barely even have to write dialogue, so long as you make sure one character says that time honored catchphrase, "Christmas isn't about getting; it's about giving."_

 _But a couple of things that special, money-generating phrase doesn't mention is_ what _, exactly, is being given and to_ whom _._

 _-Darien Fawkes_

* * *

"Alright, Darien, out with it. What's bothering you?" Claire Keeply asked.

Darien Fawkes, reclining in the much despised chair where he typically received the shot of counter-agent that prevented the Quicksilver Gland in his brain from taking over and wreaking unspeakable havoc on the world, glanced uneasily at the top of the refrigerated medicine cabinet on one wall of The Keeper's little shop of horrors, and said nothing.

"What?" Claire persisted, carefully withdrawing the precise amount of counter-agent she wanted from its vial and into her syringe and then holding the needle aloft as if she would hold its contents hostage until Darien answered her.

During the first stages of their relationship as scientist and subject, Darien would have believed her capable of that cruelty. During those first stages, she might have been, for she had been much angrier then, and her opinion of Darien had been extremely low. It also hadn't been well established what the cost of Quicksilver Madness was. These days, the unspoken threat was a hollow one, more symbolic than anything, and Darien did not respond to it.

"It's the Santa, I think."

This came from Robert Hobbes, who had come in with Darien. They'd just finished off a mission, supposedly their last before the holidays. Darien didn't for a second believe that The Official wasn't Ebeneezer Scrooge and The Grinch combined through some hideous experiment by a quack scientist tampering shamelessly in God's domain and -taking that awareness into account- he also didn't believe The Official would be giving them any time off unless it was to save on expenses.

Claire looked up at the plush Santa she had perched atop the cabinet.

The little Santa was about a foot high in its seated position with its black-booted feet hanging over the edge (making opening the cabinet a minor inconvenience; one Claire was apparently willing to tolerate in the name of the holiday spirit). It had an overly squared wool beard, two bright red cheek spots and a button nose. It was dressed in Santa's famous red and white, and for some reason it wore soft fuzzy green mittens instead of the traditional (and more practical) black leather gloves or the more recently popular silken white gloves. The faux buttons of its coat were little gold snowflakes (each one slightly different, which you could only tell if you really squinted or took a magnifying glass to them), and the big buckle of its wide belt was a bigger, more ornate gold snowflake.

"What's wrong with him?" Claire asked, looking first at Darien, then at Hobbes in puzzlement, to which she added, "Really, Bobby, you can't possibly find him offensive."

"Believe you me, Keep," Hobbes responded with evident pride, "I can find anything offensive."

Claire just stared at him for a moment, letting the meaning of those words sink in.

Then she said, "I believe you. But I'd like to think Darien here is a little more open-minded."

She looked expectantly at Darien, who continued his stare down with the stuffed Santa.

"What's to be open-minded about?" Hobbes asked with indignation, "Some old guy breaks into homes, steals food and leaves God knows what in children's socks. He watches them sleep and invades their minds against their will, reading all their thoughts and making himself judge, jury and executioner of deciding what's good and what's evil. If that's not offensive, I don't know what is."

"Really?" Claire sighed, but she clearly wasn't surprised, "And you'll go along with that, Darien?"

Darien, not really listening, finally said, "It's leering at me."

"What?" Claire asked.

"The Santa. It's leering," Darien clarified.

"He is _not_ leering," Claire said, exasperated, "He's just looking."

"Spying is more like it," Hobbes insisted, but Claire ignored him.

"Looking down with affection, maybe, but absolutely not _leering_ ," Claire continued.

"It looks like it's leering," Darien said, still eying the Santa warily.

"Oh please," Claire said, sticking the needle in Darien's arm, "I expected as much from Bobby. Bobby's paranoid, but you, Darien-"

"Watery eyes, flushed face, shaking like jelly? Screams 'addict' to me," Hobbes went on, concluding, "And I'm not paranoid."

"-I would've thought you'd like the idea of things being given to you for free," Claire said to Darien, pretending not to have heard Hobbes' interruption.

"Some contortionist thief-" Darien began.

"Contortionist!" Claire exclaimed, but Darien went on undeterred.

"-sneaks in, robs the place, puts the stuff in a sack," Darien explained, "Then the home owner catches him at it and he blurts the first stupid thing that comes into his head."

"I suppose that's something you'd know about," Claire muttered, rolling her eyes.

"Ho ho ho," Darien finished, "And you have Santa Claus."

"Yeah?" Claire asked, withdrawing the needle now the injection was delivered, "And what about the reindeer?" she put a cotton swab on Darien's arm and he put his free hand over it by habit.

"Maybe the home owner was high too," Hobbes suggested.

Darien nodded, giving Hobbes a look of agreement.

"You two are unbelievable," Claire assessed, carefully capping and disposing of the used needle.

"And I still say that Santa's leering at me," Darien said.

"Oh get out," Claire said, half-annoyed and half-amused (but trying not to show it), "the both of you."

Because of the distinctively penny-pinching nature of both The Official as an individual and The Agency as a whole, the halls were decidedly (and mercifully, to Darien's way of thinking) _not_ decked; though Eberts had found some silver(ish) tinsel sticking out of a dumpster after Christmas the year before (or maybe the year before that, by the look of it), tinsel which he had retrieved and given a thorough sterilizing before making it into a shoddy-looking wreath to be hung on The Official's office door during the holidays. The result of this burst of inept festive crafting was that anyone who opened the door would then have to spend several seconds putting the wreath back together as it inevitably leaped off the nail it was hung on and unraveled itself all over the hapless visitor. It had apparently been found inside a vat of glitter sprinkles, because you could tell from down the hall if someone had recently visited The Official by means of the Quicksilver-like flakes glinting out of hair and clothing, flakes that took ages to _mostly_ remove (removing them entirely seemed not to be possible; Darien had concluded that glitter was a kind of plague or curse that could not be conquered through force, but science had yet to discover the cure to this widespread epidemic).

Every time Darien and Hobbes approached the dreaded wreath, they had a brief debate over which of them was going to open the door (there was a rule that when The Official's door was closed, that meant don't come in. But since the wreath had gone up the door was always inexplicably closed, so Darien and Hobbes had taken to ignoring that rule). This time, however, Darien had brought a quarter to flip.

Darien had long ago mastered several techniques of either controlling what side the coin landed on, or discovering before the reveal which side the coin had landed on. There _was_ such a thing as a trick coin, but that was an easily discovered cheat, and one that could get you beat up if you took a bet with the wrong person. Besides, that was just lazy conning, and Darien was better than that. Much better to just take the coin out faster than the other party could produce a coin of their own, initiate the flip and finish the trick before they had time to back out. And unless the mark was a real sucker, it was best to never use the same trick twice; hence learning multiple means of accomplishing the same end.

Having lost the coin toss, Hobbes kicked open the door. Possibly this was just an expression of frustration, more likely it was a ham-handed attempt to avoid getting doused by glitter. A number of things happened that he apparently hadn't counted on when he initiated the maneuver. First of all, the cheap sawdust that someone had once dared call "wood" of which the door was made shattered from around the door latch, leaving it briefly engaged with the door frame (until the latch slipped out and fell to the floor with a noisy thud) while the door swung open with a bang. Secondly, the jarring impact knocked the ersatz wreath from its mooring of one nail, and it came plunging off the door like a silver(ish) snake made of tinsel trying to strike. A cloud of glitter was released into the air. The door bounced off the wall and swung back into position, struck Hobbes in the nose, and then careened back the way it had come, coating him with a fine layer of glitter (Darien would also have taken the glitter, but reflexively went invisible, protecting himself with a layer of quicksilver, which then sloughed off, taking the hateful sparkle substance with it).

"Oh, that's gonna come outta our paychecks," Hobbes muttered, struggling in vain to wipe some glitter off one of his eyelids.

"Our?" Darien asked, shaking off the quicksilver flakes, "What our? You did that all by yourself."

Instead of answering, Hobbes looked at Darien, then watched the descending quicksilver flakes and said, "That's cheating. That is an unauthorized use of the Gland, my friend."

"What's unauthorized?" Darien wanted to know, "That was reflex. I can't help it if I want to survive to the end of the Glitter Apocalypse with my will to live intact."

"You're opening the door next time," Hobbes declared.

"Oh yeah? Try and make me," Darien challenged.

Whatever Hobbes might have said back was interrupted by The Official clearing his throat ostentatiously to gain their attention and saying, "Boys, either come into the office or shut the door and go away, because -believe it or not- I have better things to do than listen to you bicker."

"I don't believe it," Darien retorted, but he did deign to enter the office.

"Also, one or the other of you will be paying to replace that door immediately," Eberts interjected, as if Darien had not spoken, "The Agency has very strict rules with regards to broken doors, including those broken by employees in fits of rage-"

"Eberts," The Official interrupted, and Eberts shut up.

"I don't suppose there'll be a holiday bonus for us," Hobbes griped, carefully stepping over the pile of glitter in the doorway as he walked into the office.

"Don't be ridiculous; the bank is closed on Christmas," The Official replied harshly, then smiled his evil little smile and added, "Think of it as unpaid overtime."

"And if I'd rather not work overtime during the holidays?" Darien inquired as he and Hobbes took their seats in front of The Official's desk.

"Well that's when your next shot'll be due; so I suppose you could think of it as insane overtime."

"Ah," Darien replied.

Darien knew there were worse devils than The Official, in fact he'd gotten a firsthand taste of that earlier this year. He also knew that The Official could be backed into a corner by the fact that Quicksilver Madness wasn't only bad for Darien; it was bad for everyone, including The Official's precious Agency, meaning the hold he had on Darien wasn't quite as strangling and fear-inspiring as it had once seemed. But the fact remained that Darien was terrified of who he became when he descended into Madness, most especially of how drunkenly he enjoyed being so powerfully out of control, and of the fact that he instinctively knew that there was a still deeper Madness beneath the layer he'd experienced, one worse by far, one he would not want to leave once he got there. Thus, The Official's threat, while somewhat weak, was incredibly effective on Darien because it preyed upon his private worst fear, one he could not shake because it was founded in reality.

But Hobbes was not held by any such chain, and he did have a complaint to make.

"We just finished a mission," Hobbes pointed out, "What? We don't get time off for a job well done anymore?"

Eberts fielded this one, "The Agency has no standing policy with regards to time off after a mission. It never has."

"Certainly not!" The Official grunted, "There's no room in the budget for that. And the enemy never sleeps, so neither can we."

Darien sighed with heavy resignation, "Okay, which terrorist group is threatening to abolish Truth, Justice and the American Way this week?"

"That's need to know," The Official replied coldly, "And you don't."

"Oh here we go," Darien with a shake of his head and roll of his eyes.

"Hey!" The Official admonished, "No eye rolling, I want you all in on this one."

"What about me?" Hobbes asked, clearly still fishing for that mythical holiday bonus.

"Are you our criminal expert?" The Official asked.

Hobbes seemed to think this over for a second, then turned to Darien and said, "Pay attention, Fawkes."

"Really?" Darien asked, but turned with sighing cooperation back to The Official, "Okay, what crime do you need solved this time?"

"This one," The Official said, with a nod to Eberts, who produced a tiny framed photograph of what to Darien looked like any one of a million babies.

"Well the quality on this picture isn't great, I'm sure the photographer was way overpaid, but that's not exactly a crime," Darien remarked, taking the photo to look at it more closely, adding without looking up, "Shoddy framework too, done cheaply I imagine."

"It's not the picture that needs your attention," The Official declared irritably, "It's the boy in the photo. He's been kidnapped, and you and Hobbes are going to devote all of your debatable skills and former free time to finding him and bringing him back by Christmas."

* * *

 ** _Author's Note:_** ** _ ** _This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day.  
_**_**

 ** _ ** _ _ **This is my fifth annual Christmas fic and, as with all previous stories, all the chapter titles are taken from lyrics of Christmas songs. If you want to know what one is, feel free to ask, or take a guess of your own if you'd rather. So far, I haven't had to repeat, but if the yearly Christmas fic tradition continues, it'll happen sooner or later. There's only so many Christmas songs out there. I will post the full list of songs at the end of the final chapter if someone requests it.  
**__**_**

 ** _ ** _ _ **Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the story.**__**_**


	2. What Child is This?

"You wanna run that by me one more time?" Darien asked.

Darien did have a special bit of wrath he reserved for those who brought misfortune to children, and he was offended that The Official would in any way equate Darien's lesser forms of criminal activity with the sin of bringing harm to a child. In Darien's mind there was the kind of crime where nobody _really_ got hurt (his kind of crime) and the kind where the _intention_ was for somebody to get hurt (not his kind of crime). A set of lock picks could hardly be equated with a revolver, nor could stealing a painting be seen as the same as stealing a baby. Objects weren't people, was the long and the short of it, and Darien's entire life philosophy was partially reliant on recognizing that fact.

"That child has been kidnapped and it is now your job to find him," The Official clarified, "I don't care how you do it, just get it done."

"Look, I get as upset about a kidnapping as the next guy," Darien said, standing up to put the picture on The Official's desk, "But, uh... why us? The police have got detectives for that, or the FBI or something. Hobbes, who runs kidnapping cases?"

The Official answered before Hobbes could respond, "Right now, in this case, _you_ do."

"Not to put too fine a point on it," Darien continued his protests, "But isn't that kind of like sending the Scooby-Doo gang to find Jack the Ripper? It's a little out of line with our skill set."

"Agreed," Hobbes said, rather to Darien's surprise, "I didn't sign on to be a babysitter. Fawkes is bad enough."

"Thank you," Darien said, then absorbed what Hobbes had actually said, "Hey!"

"It's adorable that you think I'm giving you a choice," The Official said, and smiled the smile of a man who could hold your paycheck (or your counter-agent) hostage until he got his way, and was definitely slimy enough as an individual to do it too.

"Oh that's not a good face," Hobbes said to Darien.

"That's a bad face," Darien agreed.

"That's the face I get when I ask for a raise."

"That's the face I get when I try to find a cure for Quicksilver Madness," Darien added.

"This," The Official said sternly, but while continuing to smile serenely, "is the face you get when you're not doing your job and I'm thinking about canning both of you to save on expenses."

Darien quickly reached out and picked up the photo, giving it a second look, "You know, maybe I have seen this kid somewhere. Like maybe someone in my apartment building has a kid that looks like this."

"Or maybe the newspaper delivery guy was carrying a baby this morning," Hobbes supported.

"You know what, we're on this and if we find anything, we'll be sure to get back to you," Darien said.

"Right," Hobbes confirmed, "Uh... you wouldn't have any more for us to go on than this photo, would you? Like, say... an address, family members, that kind of thing?"

"Get out of my office," The Official said sweetly, and smiled again, "And close the door behind you."

Darien and Hobbes did as they were told, taking the picture with them.

"How are we supposed to find a baby we don't even know the name of?" Darien wondered.

"You got any connections you'd like to tap?" Hobbes inquired.

"Hell no!" Darien snapped, "I never got involved in this kind of stuff; you know that."

"Eh, I just thought maybe you'd like to change your answer," Hobbes replied with a shrug.

Darien decided to ignore the implication for the moment and asked, "What about you? You know a bunch of spooks, do any of them know how to find a baby?"

"Sure," Hobbes answered, "But a particular baby outta a million of 'em? Not so much."

"I'm not even gonna ask," Darien said.

"Yeah, that's probably best," Hobbes agreed, "Here, gimme that picture."

"What for?" Darien asked, even as he handed over the picture.

"For this," Hobbes said, taking the photo over to the nearest end table and banging the glass against the corner to break it, then pulling the photograph through the front of the frame and looking on the back, "See here? Somebody wrote a name on the back of it, and a date, probably the day the kid was born or else the day the picture was taken. Our first clue."

Darien, less than impressed, said, "Hobbes? Those frames have little fiddly bits on the backing to let you take the picture out without damaging it or the frame."

"Oh?" Hobbes turned the frame over to look at the back of it.

"Yeah, how do you think they put photos in the frames to begin with? Have you... never done that for yourself?"

"Whatever," Hobbes said, pushing the frame against Darien's chest until he took it, "Let's find a computer and follow up on this name."

Darien sighed, snatched the picture and read the name, "Are you serious?"

"What?" Hobbes asked.

"This kid's name is Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd," Darien replied.

Hobbes just stared at him blankly.

"Ol' Saint Nick? The three wise men? Shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night?" Darien suggested, and Hobbes' blank look deepened, "What? They didn't have Christmas plays when you were a kid?"

"I don't remember," Hobbes answered flatly.

"Lucky you," Darien said, handing the picture back.

Frowning at the name, Hobbes wondered, "What kinda person names their kid Balthazar?"

"Someone who likes Christmas _a little too much_ ," Darien answered.

"At least they coulda gone with Emanuel or something that's actually a name. Balthazar. Sounds like a crummy wizard from a bad fantasy novel."

Darien sighed, "Let's go."

* * *

The Keeper's computer was the newest, best piece of hardware in the building, Darien knew, but it barely had internet access. The Agency was still using stereoscope toys in place of actual slides. Not that the rest of the world was going much faster on average. Darien barely knew a thing about computers. They were too big for his solo theft operations, and far too uncommon to form a partnership around. Electronics were big money, sure, but they were high risk. Too many people had gone around stealing color televisions decades ago. Too much to learn, with too few computers just lying around in the kinds of places Darien was prone to rob. He'd been told that this bright new millennium would see the rise of the computer, and perhaps the eventual realization of the world Isaac Asimov envisioned in his robot science fictions. Darien had his doubts, but his arrest at the end of 1999 and subsequent delivery into the hands of his brother followed by the addition of the Gland to his list of problems in life had thoroughly distracted him from bothering to find out.

What he did know was that computers were how you got found. Computers were what got you rapidly into trouble because the police could just zip over to one and look up your entire rap sheet. Before every police station had one of those, maybe you could get out of jail before they realized how many times you'd been arrested, but once they were in... well Darien hadn't stood a chance. Not that he'd really stood a chance in the first place with the criminally false accusation against him in that particular community, but the extensive list of crimes he'd been arrested for was what _really_ put the final nail in that coffin and gave him no chance at getting out. Except for what Kevin had done.

Darien still hadn't worked out if this was something done _for_ him or _to_ him, and he'd been torn every day since between anger and gratitude at what Kevin had done. Yet he couldn't really feel either of those things, because his brother was dead, and that was the only reality Darien really knew anymore. Anyway, his subsequent entanglement with The Agency had seen to it that he didn't get a lot of time to work it out in his head. He had too much _else_ going on in his head for that.

The reason it all came flooding back now was that Hobbes had driven them to a police station. Hobbes had flashed his badge, and basically been laughed out of the station, since of course the Department of Fish & Game really didn't have much involvement in missing persons cases. It was irritating, but expected, which was why Darien hadn't flashed anything on the way in. In fact, he had come in invisibly right behind Hobbes, and stalked around until he found an untended computer.

The reason the computer was untended seemed to be that it was as slow as time itself. Darien had first had to mess around with it until he figured out how the search engine (such as it was) functioned. The days of computers being operable solely by experts were only just beginning to fade, the rise of the PC was only a few years in (a few decades if you included PCs owned by geeky nerd types who built their own from scraps and later grew up to become successful scientists), and Darien hadn't ever poked around at electronics besides playing Donkey Kong in the arcade, mainly because Kevin had found the arcade fascinating and there had been times he'd dragged Darien with him (there had been some hope in somebody's mind that Kevin could keep Darien out of trouble; but of course he couldn't, and neither could a game of Asteroids). Kevin could touch a computer and it would bend to his will. Darien could touch a computer and cause it to short circuit and fry itself.

It was a weird time to be thinking of Kevin, but the computer and police station combined made it hard not to think of him, impossible not to remember those massive computer banks that had stored the data for Kevin's life's work, the only remnant of that now being stored unhappily in Darien's head.

 _Come on,_ Darien thought, trying to distract himself, _How many people named Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd could there possibly be in California?_

Truthfully, Darien didn't know what the computer was doing, but he assumed it was taking its sweet time retrieving every single reference to the name he'd given it, and maybe anything that looked remotely like that name. Either that or it was asking its fellow computers if the name Balthazar was a legitimate search query or if it should raise the alarm because an invisible man was trying to access information he hadn't strictly -or even loosely- speaking gotten permission to look at.

In the technical sense, it was information he could get access to, but all the paperwork shenanigans that had to happen before anyone here would take him or Hobbes remotely seriously were too extensive to be worth it, especially since The Official was bound to be of no help whatsoever, not because he couldn't help, but because he wouldn't. That was just how-

He didn't finish the thought because the computer finally spat out what it had collected. Darien wasn't sure how many Nicholas Balthazar Shepherds there were in California, much less the world, but right now there was only one in the age range he'd specified.

Eleven-and-a-half month old (was that still a baby or was that toddler range?) Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd, son of (really?) Joe and Rosemary Shepherd. But what really struck Darien as odd was the fact that Rosemary's (who probably went by Mary, all things considered) maiden name was Borden. Did that, perhaps, make her the... probably younger... sister of one Charles Borden; AKA The Official? Assuming that was true, why hadn't he just _said_ that?

Scratch that, The Official hadn't even voluntarily told Darien his own name. Nor had Claire, for that matter. The Official and The Keeper was how they'd been introduced. Eberts was just Eberts, and Bobby Hobbes was of course Bobby Hobbes, because they couldn't do the secret identity thing.

Extracting information from The Official was like pulling teeth, and Darien pitied the sucker on the terrorist side of things who might have captured him some time in the history of his long career and tried to torture intel out of him. Idly, Darien wondered how many idiots had been fired for failing to get anything but a smug grin out of the fat man.

Darien looked around for a way to print this, though he wasn't sure where the printer in this station was located, but the user interface was so bad there wasn't a distinct tools bar or printer icon or anything to give him a clue as to how it was done. So instead he did his best to memorize what he saw, in particular the address of the baby's parents. Not that there was a great deal of information here.

Then, knowing he should get out before Hobbes got himself thrown out, Darien left the computer and returned to Hobbes, who was still vehemently arguing with the badge at the front desk.

Darien gave his shoulder a tap, but Hobbes was deeply into the argument. Impatient, Darien bodily turned Hobbes around and started shoving him to the door while Hobbes was still yelling threats over his shoulder to the policeman, who had apparently seen him before and knew Hobbes for the raging paranoid that he was. That the man thought Hobbes was crazy already provided adequate cover for why Hobbes was loudly declaring he wasn't done yelling yet while apparently propelling himself at full speed towards the exit.

Once outside, Hobbes forgot the argument and asked, "Did you find out who our boy is?"

"Better," Darien answered, "I found out why The Official wants us to find him."


	3. It Don't Seem Right

After little debate, Hobbes and Darien agreed that going back to The Official would gain them nothing. It might be satisfying to go and shout at him for not giving them this piece of information and instead making them hunt for it themselves, but he'd find some way to make them the losers and they'd just wind up wasting their time and energy. The Official had already done that to them once today, there was no good reason to let him do it to them again.

Instead, they went to the address of the Shepherds, and tried to get in.

"Hello, Mrs. Shepherd?" Hobbes said to the woman who answered the door, "We're here about a missing child."

If this was The Official's sister, Darien didn't see much family resemblance. Firstly, the woman was much younger than The Official. Probably The Official's hair was once blond like hers, though Darien had difficulty imagining The Official as anything other than what he was now. The Official gave off this vibe like he hadn't been born, just materialized in that chair behind his desk, balding and smug and evil. Contrariwise, this woman looked like she had aged greatly in probably just the last few hours or however long it had been since her baby was stolen.

"Oh yes, please come in," was what she said, and Darien couldn't imagine any relative of The Official ever sounding so very little like a gangster, or having such an open look in their eyes.

It was clear she had cried recently, but she was not doing so now, and was wise enough not to be wearing makeup that would run down her face and smear. Maybe she was prone to sweating or crying anyway and had some of that waterproof stuff. Hobbes and Darien exchanged incredulous looks as they entered through the door and stood in the foyer. Could this woman really be related to The Official?

The interior of the home looked a little bit like Claire's place, but slightly more roomy and more lived in. It was no surprise that the halls here were thoroughly decked, or that there was a Celtic Cross hanging on the wall just inside the door above a nativity scene arranged on an end table, though it felt a bit jarring seeing them together, knowing which stories these items belonged to.

Darien was glad he wasn't here to rob the place. He didn't like seeing a cross or anything like that on the wall in a place he was robbing, it usually made him feel guilty (as if he what he was doing was wrong or something), and also as if he were being watched. Not that he did his thieving at homes around Christmas anyway. It might have been easy because people would forget to lock up when they went caroling or whatever, but it was the sort of thing only a very tacky cat burglar would do. Darien wasn't in love with the idea of Christmas like most people seemed to be, but he didn't have to actively destroy the holiday for everyone else. _He_ wasn't a Grinch after all.

The main feature of the home was clearly the hardwood floors and mahogany furniture, and every bit of décor was about going with and/or complimenting that. The Christmas décor had clearly taken the place over, and the decorator apparently favored a sort of indigo blue to the more usual red and green.

There was some of the holly and ivy sort of stuff, but a lot of religious overtones, such as a set of angels dressed in blue starry dresses, playing a variety of instruments, at least one of which Darien wasn't sure what it was; apparently the set designer couldn't be content with just a trumpet, a harp and a violin like a normal person, he or she had to get fancy and elaborate with it.

Darien wondered what the set was worth.

"You gettin' a weird, religious nut vibe off this place?" Hobbes whispered to Darien as they followed Mrs. Shepherd into the living room and accepted seats on the couch at her invitation.

Darien took a second look around. Religious artifacts were abundant, but -having seen the inside of a _lot_ of houses- Darien didn't note them as excessive. He'd noticed that religious people tended to use religion-themed objects to decorate their houses indiscriminately, meaning they didn't stop and say "Well, I have six things in here that peg me as a Buddhist, I should stop with that or people might think I'm crazy." No, they thought about clutter and color and whether this looked good next to that, but they did not seem to say to themselves, "I shall fill my home with precisely this many objects with religious connotations."

And, like people who liked puppies or flowers or dolls, people who liked crosses or angels tended to have an overwhelming number and variety of them everywhere in their house. At a guess, Darien thought someone in this house must like angels and nativity sets, but there was only the one cross he'd seen in the foyer, and some Biblical passage in fancy lettering hanging from a wall in a frame, in that way that people liked to hang a series of words instead of a picture. Otherwise... there was your typical Christmas village, and a very beautifully done Santa on a sleigh sitting on the coffee table. Religious they were, but apparently that wasn't their exclusive interest. Of course, some religious nuts had _no_ decorative tip offs in their home at all, and you only found out when they talked at you.

"Joe isn't here right now," Mrs. Shepherd told them, "He went out for groceries. But the police said one of us should stay here in case the kidnappers try to contact us. They set up something to do with the phone, and there's supposed to be someone here with me."

"Supposed to be?" Darien asked quickly, forgetting the décor.

"I'm not sure why there isn't," Mrs. Shepherd said after she nodded in the affirmative, her voice trembling just slightly, "He was here, but then a few minutes ago somebody called him and he left in rather a hurry. He said he wouldn't be gone long, and that I shouldn't worry."

Darien and Hobbes exchanged looks. It wasn't The Official's style to pull strings and get the police to essentially do his bidding, but then it wasn't typically his nephew who'd been kidnapped. The Official certainly had the pull to get a police detective out of the Shepherd home.

"We've just been assigned to help with the case," Hobbes said.

Really it wasn't a lie, he was just omitting a certain truth.

"Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?"

"I've already told the police everything I know," Mrs. Shepherd replied.

"I understand that, Mrs. Shepherd," Hobbes said smoothly, "But we've got to ask for our records. Paperwork, am I right?" he smiled at his own joke, but of course Mrs. Shepherd was in no mood for it.

"Yes, of course," was all she said, accepting the explanation.

It was surprisingly easy, as the bereaved mother did not even demand to see their ID. Just hearing they were here about the missing baby was apparently enough to gain them entry to the abode, and to get answers to whatever questions Hobbes could come up with. Surely this woman _could not_ be related to Charles Borden AKA The Official. It just was not possible.

While Hobbes asked the obligatory questions about the child's age, where he was taken from, if the Shepherds had any enemies who stood to gain from the child's kidnapping, Darien's mind wandered.

Mrs. Shepherd was a lean, somewhat angular woman, who looked naught at all like the decidedly round and rather portly Official. She spoke earnestly, as if she had nothing to hide, whereas The Official -even when he was honest- sounded like he had a world of secrets under his hat.

Looking around the room, Darien realized the windows were small, bad for breaking in. The open plan of the house allowed him to see part of the dining room from where he sat, and all the way to the back of the house. There was a back door, probably wood or well disguised steel, the top half had a frosted glass window with decorative (and break-in thwarting) iron grille-work. The front door was similar, only the full door had that frosted glass and grille-work, except for a peephole.

Of course, a decent thief didn't break when he entered, he just picked the locks.

Taking another look at the front door by looking over his shoulder, Darien noted it had a decent deadbolt, and a chain lock (which Mrs. Shepherd had neglected to have engaged when they arrived, possibly because she'd forgotten to lock it when the detective left, or maybe because she expected her husband back soon, or maybe it was a bad habit; thieves made note of such habits). The back door was only dead-bolted, with the same kind of deadbolt as the front door. Assuming door and frame were solid, it would be a nuisance to get into this place through the door, especially quickly or noiselessly.

He was drawn back to attention by Hobbes' next, utterly tactless, question.

"Excuse me," Hobbes began, as if this would pardon the rudeness of his query, "But you seem a little old to be having your first baby. Was Nicky adopted?"

Mrs. Shepherd had referred to her son throughout the conversation with Hobbes as 'Nicky,' and Hobbes had picked that up. He'd also learned that there was a babysitter, but that Mrs. Shepherd had been at home with the baby at the time of the kidnapping. The child had been asleep in his crib, and Mrs. Shepherd at work in the living room, making a space for the Christmas tree.

Mrs. Shepherd had explained that the tree was too big for her to easily manage, so her husband would get it out, and they would normally decorate it together, but he'd been so busy with work there hadn't been time earlier in the month to get the tree up. They'd been planning, she said, to leave it up until February, so that they might have time to enjoy it, since they were putting it up so late. It was one of those details people just throw in, and it sounded normal enough to Darien. There was still an empty space there; clearly any thought of getting the tree up had gone from mind.

"Hobbes!" Darien rebuked, knowing well that asking a woman her age, or even suggesting she _had_ an age, was generally a good way to get yourself into trouble.

"No," Mrs. Shepherd answered, "No, he's right. Nicky _was_ adopted. Joe and I, neither of us were particularly lucky in love. We both married young. Joe divorced his first wife. My husband died of cancer. Joe dated several women, but never remarried. I couldn't bring myself to go out for quite some time after Nicholas', my first husband, death."

"You named your kid after your dead husband?" Hobbes asked before Darien could stop him.

"I've always loved the name Nicholas, and it seemed appropriate, considering when Nicky was born," Mrs. Shepherd replied, apparently not offended, "The fact that it was my first husband's name was coincidence, but I don't think he would have minded. It was Joe's idea, actually."

"Your husband's exes have any problem with you or him?" Hobbes asked, and the smooth operator part of Darien cringed inwardly at this delivery.

A good thief needed to case a joint before he robbed it, and that often meant visiting while the owners were present, making nice but not memorable with them, and that meant being able to say things in a certain way so that you seemed friendly and trustworthy, but not pushy. Ideally, they should have forgotten you by the time you robbed the place. The way Hobbes had just delivered that question, especially on the heels of his other etiquette transgressions, was inexcusably indelicate.

"No," Mrs. Shepherd replied rather flatly.

"We have to ask," Darien leaped in before Hobbes could say anything worse, "Most kidnapping cases involve someone known to the family," he didn't know if that was true, but it sounded plausible.

"I suppose that does make sense," Mrs. Shepherd admitted with evident reluctance, "But there's no one I know of who's got anything like a grudge against me or Joe, and everybody loves Nicky."

"Anybody maybe love Nicky a little too much, like they want him for themselves?" Hobbes asked, and Darien could've just kicked him for it.

Mrs. Shepherd was shaking her head, but then something seemed to occur to her.

"What?" Darien asked, "Somebody?"

"Maybe," Mrs. Shepherd said slowly, "I have a brother, Charlie. I don't hear from him often. I mostly see him around Christmas, if at all. But he was one of the first people who called when Nicky went missing, to offer his condolences. We don't... talk much. But he said he'd do everything he could to get Nicky back for me. I couldn't figure out what he meant. He's an accountant or something for the government, I think. I don't know what he could do. Maybe it sounds strange, and it seems too extreme for him, but -when we were children- sometimes one of my dolls would go missing and he'd find it and I'd be very happy and grateful. And then one day I found out he was the one who'd been hiding them all along, to make himself look good when he found them."

Hobbes and Darien exchanged looks.

"We'll look into that, Mrs. Bord- I mean, Mrs. Shepherd," Hobbes lied falteringly.

"How did you know my maiden name was Borden?" Mrs. Shepherd asked, suspicious for the first time.

"We're government agents, that's the sort of thing we know," Darien recovered for him.

Mrs. Shepherd accepted this for some bizarre reason, and didn't demand to know which branch of the government they worked for. A more trusting person Darien had not met in a long, long time, and he once again doubted there could be any relation -blood or otherwise- between her and The Official.

Yet, whatever he thought of The Official, Darien didn't believe for a moment that he'd kidnapped Nicky. Not that he wouldn't do such a thing, but that he would've sent somebody like Darien to accomplish a feat like that. And there was only one Darien Fawkes, and _he_ certainly hadn't had anything to do with a kidnapping.

But _somebody_ had entered the home while the mother was present, and taken the child in broad daylight. That meant they were either very, very bold or else very, very stupid.


	4. To Investigate a Noise

It was thief's instinct more than anything, but Darien thought he should go see the scene of the crime, preferably alone. So he made the traditional exit, asking about the bathroom. It was upstairs, down the hall, to the left. Good enough to get him out of sight, though the head of the stairs and indeed most of the upstairs hallway was visible from the living room. Darn open-plan houses. Fortunately, Darien was carrying a ready-made solution around in his brain, so he didn't have to wonder what he'd do.

So Darien went up the stairs to the left, almost into the bathroom before there was any wall between him and the living room to make sure he wasn't seen. In a good and proper world, his partner would have been able to ensure that Mrs. Shepherd was adequately distracted without also making her suspicious, but Hobbes was not a good partner in crime, and it was probably best if he just kept doing the "I'm a government agent looking into your son's kidnapping" thing. He wasn't especially good at that either, because his people skills were miserable, but at least it was a role he'd practiced.

Once invisible, Darien turned right around and went to the other end of the hall, where the bedrooms were. The first he found was a guest bedroom. The door opposite that looked like a hall closet, so Darien ignored it and went to the next pair of doors towards the end of the hall. One was decidedly a master bedroom, but the other opened into a nursery. None of the doors were latched, just pushed to, and fortunately well-oiled at the hinges, for they opened quite silently. Good for a thief, especially one robbing a home of its most valuable treasure while it was occupied.

The worst places to rob were actually less maintained houses, with squeaky doors, stiffly unresponsive locks and windows that hadn't been opened in so long that they had partially cemented themselves closed. It was harder to leave no traces if there was dust on everything, and cobwebs stuck all over the windows and -worst of all- wasp nests over the doors. An active wasp nest was one of the most effective deterrents in Darien's book, but he'd never seen even the most paranoid human use one of those on purpose. On the other hand, he wasn't sure if wasps could be encouraged to nest over a door.

Of course, in winter, there weren't any nesting wasps, though an ignorant person might shy away from an abandoned nest anyway. Darien tended to avoid houses that left wasp nests unmolested. If they let wasps fly around their front door unchecked, their house was probably full of spiders lurking in the shadows, just waiting to pop out at some innocent and unsuspecting thief.

But this was a well-kept house, to such an extent that Darien suspected a maid must work here. Though Darien couldn't pass himself off successfully as a babysitter or a housekeeper -not only because most people tended to shy away from young males in such positions but also because of his mannerisms and habitual style of dress- he knew people in his line who could. Any household employees could be suspect, especially if they suddenly stopped showing up for work. Usually people paid housekeepers and babysitters in cash, making no record of who that person was, especially if they seemed to fit the accepted stereotype for the role (a woman able to pass herself off as a girl in her teens was unlikely to be suspected of anything untoward if she hired on as a babysitter).

 _Housekeeper. Suspect. Remember that._ Darien told himself.

Darien wasn't entirely sure what a normal baby's room looked like. He actually hadn't been in very many of them. Generally the sort of valuables he was interested in couldn't be found in baby rooms, and though of course he knew himself not to be a dirty pervert, the people he'd robbed had no way of knowing that, so he'd made it a rule to stay out of kids rooms. The objective was of course for nobody to know he'd been there, and to leave no evidence of where he'd been, but it was for his peculiarly vociferous (for a criminal) conscience that he avoided doing some things and going certain places.

Thus he got his idea of baby rooms primarily out of movies, though he'd seen a few when he'd posed as some kind of security consultant or employee of an alarm company checking all the windows (best way to break and enter was to know in advance exactly what sort of locks and alarms people had in place, and whether or not they were being used correctly).

But he wasn't looking at this as a baby's room, really. He was looking at it as if it were a study with a safe in it, or some similar. The crib was the objective, and there was almost nothing in the room to give a thief any trouble. Except... was that a baby monitor on the nightstand next to the crib? It was, but a closer inspection revealed that somebody had turned it off. Was that before the kidnapping? Or had it been done after to conserve batteries? Not that it mattered much to Darien.

The police had clearly already been over the room, dusted for prints, collected anything that looked like evidence, all that. Darien needed to look for something they might have missed. Something only he, as a professional thief, would see. So far, this excursion had been a bust. The Official and Claire would just _love_ that, him using the Gland, running up a bill and gaining nothing from its use.

A bit discouraged by not having found anything useful, Darien turned to go, and stopped short because, standing in the doorway, was the thing the police might have overlooked.

Head lowered, short fur of its shoulders bristling, green ribbon hang absurdly askew on its loosely attached collar, a Rottweiler braced itself on its four paws, growling low in its throat. Only it was a puppy about four or five months old, making it mostly head, its gangly legs supported its weight unevenly and its massive paws looked like someone had strapped rust-red dinner plates to its otherwise ink-black frame. Darien had learned tremendous respect for these massive watchdogs early on in his career, not counting the ones that were kept outside in the yard and regarded as vicious (those dogs could bark their fool heads off and nobody would pay any attention, and they were unable to enter the house, making them a non-issue to the wily thief).

Rotties looked like big, lazy goofballs when their owners were around, and it was easy to think their reputation as guardians was way overrated. But meet a Rotty at night, or in a house without his master, and it was a different story. Darien had a scar on one of his calves from a particularly enthusiastic dog that had pursued him over a back fence years ago. There was a distinct difference between the dogs that guarded and the ones that didn't. Darien had broken into homes with Golden Retrievers with impunity, keeping something good in his pocket to bribe the dog and then go about his business. But a true guard dog would not be bribed. A guard dog would take your hand off, and eat that instead.

Clearly this rag-doll of a puppy thought it was already a guard dog. As it was already almost two feet tall at the shoulder and easily fifty pounds in weight, Darien wasn't terribly keen on having an argument with it. Unfortunately, a dog identifies things by scent first, sound second, and sight last. The fact that the pup couldn't see Darien in no way hindered its ability to detect him. Because it was a puppy, it hadn't quite accurately located him -yet- but it was working on it, growling uncertainly as it swung its head side to side, looking for the source of the scent that had apparently woken it from a nap and brought in here to investigate what it seemed to detect as a hostile intruder.

 _Oh crap,_ Darien managed to keep the phrase in mind, rather than letting it slip from his mouth, as such a noise would probably lead the dog straight to him.

His only real hope at this juncture was that he'd been all over the room. Ideally, the pup would come through the door, investigating more closely for scent, hopefully following the trail from the beginning instead of air scenting to find where the scent came from most strongly now. If it left the door, he could slip out and make for the stairs. Once in the living room, he would probably be protected by the owner, if the dog didn't stop short and realize he was supposed to be a guest on its own.

That was the difference between a guard dog and a vicious dog. A guard dog would listen to its owners if they declared someone welcome in the home, though the dog might attack that person if they came uninvited at some later date. A vicious dog attacked regardless. A puppy might not have learned self-control, or to tell intruders from guests, but likely a word from its owner would stop it.

Or that's what Darien _hoped_. He hadn't spent much time around dogs, only trying to figure out how to stop being around them. What little he knew had mostly come from proud owners telling him about their lovely mutts when the dogs came into the room, usually deciding him right then and there as to whether he would put the house on his list of possible targets. Many a dog had come growling forward, only to be halted at a word or gesture from its owner. Darien had little faith in the power of a master's voice, partially because it was his opinion that authority figures were made to be ignored, but mostly because many people only thought they were the dog's master, when in fact the brute did as it pleased.

Even as he watched the puppy warily as it sniffed in the doorway, Darien knew this was something the police might have overlooked. Why hadn't the pup responded to the kidnapper's presence? Perhaps it had been outdoors, or maybe at the vet's, or whatever, but maybe it had been right here and yet had for some reason done nothing to prevent the kidnapping. Maybe the pup hadn't learned that just because someone had been let into the home, that didn't mean they had permanent permission to come and go as they pleased. But Darien was inclined by experience to discount that as a possibility. Pups were generally boisterously friendly at all times, and this pup was _anything_ but friendly now.

Gradually, the pup began to sniff at the carpet. But it did not enter the room. Darien didn't know that some dogs are trained not to enter a baby's room, a precaution owners take against the dog possibly harming the child when no one is around in case the door is left open by mistake.

This particular pup had been taught that he was not to enter this room unless express consent was given by way of a learned word of invitation or command. But he had been roused from a nap in his bed next to his master's by the sound of the door being pushed open. Darien had not seen him because he was on the far side of the bed in relation to the door. Darien had not pulled the door quite as closed as it had been when he arrived, not realizing that there was a difference between a door unlatched and a door left partially ajar. The dog had hesitated to investigate, unsure of whether a randomly opened door meant he was allowed out or not. He'd learned that open doors weren't always meant to be gone through. For instance, if the front door was open, that was not tacit permission for him to make an exit. In fact, without leash attached or command, he was not to go through that door _ever_.

Finally, his curiosity had gotten the better of him. He had heard the voices downstairs, but dismissed them because he heard the voice of Mrs. Shepherd. He had learned that there were times he was allowed to bark and times he was not. This was one of the latter times, as it was clearly some sort of welcome company, but he himself was apparently not wanted, which puzzled him. But he passively accepted this as any properly reared dog will. But there was a much closer scent that struck him right outside the door, and he had followed this strange odor to the baby's room.

Still hearing conversational voices downstairs, the pup decided not to bark. But something still told him that there was an intruder in there somewhere, for he had learned to find hidden treats by scent and therefore to use his nose regularly, and to trust what it told him, as many dogs sadly have not.

The pup also knew that something traumatic had happened to upset his world. His beloved human masters were extremely upset, and he was sure it had something to do with the absence of the baby from this room. A guard dog is supposed to guard his master's possessions as well as his person, and the pup's simple logic was that he had failed in that duty and now his family was desperately unhappy. He was not willing that such a crime should happen twice under his nose.

For the moment, any aspect of puppy mischief was absent, though his growl stilled and he first sat and then lay down. His head was up, ears forward, watching alertly this room that smelled of a stranger he could not see nor approach without breaking what to him was a sacred Law. But he could keep this intruder trapped indefinitely, until perhaps the guest downstairs should leave and his mistress should come up and take over, tell him how to deal with this mysterious affair. Maybe there was exception to the rule barring entry if there was an intruder. But the pup would not chance it. He would wait for someone to tell him what to do. He was a puppy, one partway through a thorough education, and he had learned to look for help from his master or mistress if he wasn't sure what to do.

And so, both dog and Darien stayed, waiting for something to happen.


	5. Maybe I Won't Make a Sound

There is no feeling quite like being trapped and not knowing when you'll get out, or what will befall you once you do. This feeling was one with which Darien had been intimately acquainted for quite some time, even prior to his unwilling appointment as an agent of the Agency. Prison didn't suit him, but the preamble to sentencing was ever the worst part, because he could never be quite sure how long he'd have to wait for sentencing, or what the sentence would eventually be.

Darien realized that he was trapped until the dog should get bored... or until suspicions were raised and Mrs. Shepherd came up to see what was keeping Darien in the bathroom. And how would he explain his presence in the baby's room? And the fact that he'd gone snooping in the other bedrooms as well might be difficult to explain (he'd figured out by now that the dog must have been in one of those rooms, and he had inadvertently let it out). If he'd asked permission, as a detective would have, this would not be so hard. But deception was Darien's first course, and it hadn't occurred to him until now that -as someone looking into the case- he could make the same excuse as if he was pretending to work for a security company. Checking all the windows and doors for tampering.

His current jailor could be considered among the cutest it had ever been his displeasure to be held captive by, but that didn't really impress him a lot, as the fact remained that he was effectively incarcerated until such time as the puppy should leave, someone came looking for him or he found a way out on his own. Small for a Rottweiler, the pup was still quite large enough to have a mouthful of teeth Darien didn't want to test the unpleasantness of being bitten by.

Quietly, head up, paws under him, lying sphinx-like on the floor, forepaws just barely touching the threshold, the Rottweiler puppy waited, looking as if he had all the time in the world and nothing better to do, the half-undone green ribbon hanging ostentatiously below his powerful, slightly drooling, jaws.

Darien was (quite reasonably, in his own estimation) extremely averse to any and all forms of pain, from the emotional to the physical. Though he imagined he could hear that dark impulse towards Madness knocking at the back of his brain already, he knew there would be lots of time before that problem would manifest itself, and that meant his desire to avoid being bitten was greater than his need to leave the room. At least, that's how things stood for the moment.

It was not the way they could stand for long, however. Though Darien knew that Mrs. Shepherd would become suspicious long before it became a problem, still he felt a nervous awareness of the fact that he had quicksilver running through him by the gallon when the Gland was active. He needed counter-agent frequently anyhow, but in full use the Gland would try to take over far more rapidly than when it was more or less neutralized. The more he used it here and now, the sooner he'd need that counter-agent, and he wasn't at all certain -now he knew the missing boy was The Official's nephew- just how serious that threat to withhold counter-agent might be.

In the rule of logic, there was no sense in withholding it; Darien couldn't work without it, and the Gland didn't work without _him_. The Official seemed to think he and Hobbes were the best chance Nicky had. There was no reason. But Darien had too recently been betrayed. He remembered too sharply the feel of Madness seeping over him, with the intention of backing him into becoming a killer. That had not been done by The Official, but Darien's ability to trust people was rather minimal at the best of times.

Since Kevin had stuck him with the Gland without telling him everything, DeFohn had made sure that Quicksilver Madness would be a side effect, The Official had pretty much literally kidnapped Darien into service to The Agency, and everything that had come with that, Darien's ability to trust was at an all-time low. So no, he had no confidence that logic was in command of The Official's actions. And his own logic that it didn't make any sense for The Official to turn on him now, that neither Hobbes nor Claire would tolerate it, didn't make his emotions run any less riot.

Though sheer terror was not how he activated the Gland now, always fear was the root of it. It was technically some kind of adrenaline thing, but it went hand-in-hand with the emotion of fear insofar as Darien's use of it was concerned. So, in a way, fear had been at work the moment Darien turned invisible, long before the dog had ever shown up.

The dog.

Patience is not among the virtues of most puppies, and -though Darien didn't know it- Rottweilers were particularly slow to develop maturity. It might in fact have surprised some people that the pup had managed a moment's seriousness, if they didn't also realize that a well-educated dog can read his master's moods as well as most people read words.

The pup didn't know what exactly had happened, or what it meant, but he knew his master and mistress were distraught, and it had something to do with this room. The baby's absence was a change of pattern, and dogs are quite pattern oriented. Therefore, the pup had concluded, change in this room might well be a bad thing that should be prevented.

Darien's scent was a change. A stranger in this sacred room a dog must only enter at the order of his master. In this room where the baby was not but should be. The pup put these things together, and though he lacked guard training, the instincts for it ran very close to the surface.

Many is the dog who has chosen for himself a job his owners may not have intended. The pup didn't know he was meant to be an ornamental guardian, not an active one. Nobody had ever told him that he was merely a family pet who would look scary if needed.

Puppies are notoriously bad watchdogs. They have difficulty taking anything seriously, have a very short attention span and can't handle a great deal of pressure or stress. Yet many are the young Rottweilers who have become a ferocious protector, if perhaps not a terribly well-behaved companion.

Still, the puppy lay there, getting bored, perhaps beginning to doubt what his nose told him because he was young enough not to be fully confident in his nose as an older dog who has spent his life trusting his scenting prowess and being rewarded would be. There was also something... indefinably strange about this scent which made him question the parts of it that seemed to mark it as human. The pup had never smelled quicksilver before, but he knew that the scent of it was not a human one, that it came from something... _other_. Yet the primary scent was human. But he'd never smelled a human this close that he couldn't also see, which puzzled him mightily. It was a very confusing thing he was faced with, and the pup sensed the problem was out of his league to suss out, at least by himself.

Besides, he could hear his mistress' voice downstairs and, like any good dog, he desired only to be near her or his master (or, ideally, both). And there was a guest, one who might pet and make much of him. Here, on the other hand, was a bothersome scent he didn't know what to do with, in a room he wasn't allowed to enter.

If Darien had spent more time around dogs, and less time getting caught by the police, he would have known what it meant when the ears began to twitch, the eyes roll a little, the weight shift, the breathing beginning to deepen into a sigh, and he would have simply waited for the pup to get bored and leave. But he couldn't read the signals of any dog -much less a Rottweiler- to such a useful degree. To him, it looked like the pup was settling in for the long haul, and Darien could not wait forever.

Just as the puppy turned his head to look towards the stairs, Darien decided to make a run for it and hop over the recumbent dog. It was a short distance across the room, and Darien was as quiet as he could be. But noiseless to a human is often a cacophony of sound to a dog, in fact most dogs can hear a whispered word from several feet away, and the pup at once heard his approach. The pup was also thoroughly aware of the sudden advent of the alien scent, and the brief sense of the temperature near his nose dropping due to the peculiar qualities of quicksilver.

The pup barked once because he was startled, and a second time because he felt threatened and wanted to warn off the approaching creature. That second bark was his final warning.

A human, using eyes first, will doubt what he detects with his other senses, unless he is blind. But a dog has relatively poor vision, and he will believe his other senses without question if he has learned to use them at all (excellent mimics, many dogs learn to investigate the world by observing humans instead of other dogs, and humans almost never use their noses. This is the primary reason so many dogs are frightened of inanimate objects). The pup accurately judged where this stranger seeming intent on rushing him was, and lunged with mouth agape to demonstrate his feelings about this unsanctioned attempt at familiarity. His teeth found their mark with surprising precision for such a young animal, and prevented Darien from sticking the landing.

Darien went down with an involuntary yell that was more fear than pain, fell and tumbled and instinctively went for the stairs, crawling toward them even before he managed to get up. The Rottweiler's aim had been true, but the hold he'd secured was a poor one, and the pup lost his grip even as Darien hit the floor.

Born a predator (as all dogs are born, live and eventually die), the dog was delighted with the noise that had come from his unseen foe, for it sounded excitingly like a wounded animal. Like all dogs who adore squeaking their squeaky toys, the pup reveled in the sound of injured and dying prey.

As Darien started to get up and run for the stairs, the pup launched from the floor and hit Darien in the spine with all his fifty-pound weight, sending them both tumbling down the stairs with a ridiculous amount of noise.

Mrs. Shepherd cried out at the sound and leaped up to investigate, but had fortunately not been looking towards the stairs, so she missed the spectacle of the puppy apparently levitating down the stairs with his teeth firmly clamped on thin air.

By the time he hit the floor in the foyer, Darien had shed his quicksilver, though he wasn't sure later if he had managed it due to presence of mind or if he had merely lost control of the Gland in his panic. Though activated through fear, the Gland could be deactivated in similar fashion. The Gland was a truly fickle thing.

"Diez! Aus!" Mrs. Shepherd all-but shouted, all traces of meekness or sorrow gone from her, to be replaced by the stridently fierce tone of a drill sergeant.

Darien had hit his head on the way down, but it worried him vaguely that he hadn't understood either word through the ringing in his ears. But he was relieved that the dog released the collar of his jacket, albeit reluctantly. The dog looked up at Mrs. Shepherd, then back at the jacket he had been having such fun tearing at. The dog reached for the jacket again, but his teeth barely had time to meet in the fabric before Mrs. Shepherd had rebuked him sharply.

"Pfui! Aus!" she stormed, taking a step closer.

Crestfallen but obedient, the Rottweiler abandoned his game, which had only just begun to become truly entertaining, and slid awkwardly off Darien's back. Shame-faced and with meekly lowered head, the puppy came to his mistress and sat, looking up at her in sorrowful appeal. He'd been having such a fine time, and it seemed like humans were always telling him to stop just when he really got into a game. Truthfully, after the first snap when the pup had felt himself attacked, he had forgotten his serious self-appointed duty of guard dog and everything after that had been in play to him.

To the pup, the tumble down the stairs had been a grand time, and he would have enjoyed repeating it. Riding someone falling down the stairs while hanging onto their jacket had been a fabulous exercise from the pup's perspective, and he didn't understand why it was that humans were always forbidding him from doing things that were really fun.

"Fawkes!" Hobbes had caught up with events after a moment of staring at the scene, and he ran over to help Darien up, "What the hell happened?"

"I... uh..." Darien stammered, trying to unscramble his panic-ridden brain to find an answer that was something short of the truth for the benefit of Mrs. Shepherd, "met... your ah... dog."

"I'm _so_ sorry," Mrs. Shepherd gushed, her command presence lost, "Diesel has never attacked anyone before. I thought he was shut up in the bedroom! Really, he's a sweet dog and he's never done anything like this!" fear was plain in her eyes, fear for the life of her beloved pet, "He's just a puppy and doesn't really know his own strength."

Every owner of a so-called dangerous breed knows the fear of having their dog taken away and put down for the slightest infraction. They know that a dog is usually put down after an attack before the facts of a case are known.

As for Darien, he knew full-well that he'd been snooping where he wasn't invited, and that it was his fault the dog had gotten out. He was trying to get his head around the idea that Mrs. Shepherd wasn't demanding to know what he'd been doing in her bedroom. Panicky and not thinking straight, he couldn't come up with a response, much less an accusation. Really, he wanted the whole incident forgotten as quickly as possible, before Mrs. Shepherd thought to ask what he'd been doing up there.

Seeing Darien's usual ability to smooth talk his way out of almost anything was failing, Hobbes hurried to cover for him, looking with grave exaggeration at his watch and saying, "Look at the time, we have a meeting to get to! Come on, Fawkes, this is no time to be playing with somebody's dog."

Accepting no protests from any quarter, Hobbes propelled Darien towards the front door while Mrs. Shepherd continued to shout apologies and the dog bounced around her legs, barking excitedly in response to what he saw as some new kind of game to replace the one taken away from him.

Only once he'd all but shoved Darien into the passenger seat of the van outside and climbed into the driver's seat himself did Hobbes look at Darien, who briefly met his eyes, then looked mutely away.

"You okay?" Hobbes asked, eying first the tear on Darien's jacket collar and then the similar rip in the leg of his pants, possibly wondering if there were any wounds under those tears.

Darien thought that over for awhile, fighting through a haze of fright.

"No," he answered, "But I'll live."

"We'll let the Keep be the judge of that, my friend," Hobbes replied, sticking the key in the ignition and starting the van.

"Okay," Darien answered quietly.


	6. The Spirit in Your Heart

One thing Darien had an abundance of was nerve. Though when he was frightened it was generally a deep, gut-wrenching terror, he recovered quickly from fear, and experience could immunize him to things that had previously terrified him (hence why the sight of a tarantula could no longer trigger the quicksilver-defense reaction as it once had). This was not the first time a dog had chased and bitten him, and he suspected glumly that it might not be the last either.

He much preferred the time he'd snuck into Claire's house and found to his chagrin that she had a yappy little dog, and then also discovered to his pleasure that the quickness and lightness of the hands that made him an excellent pickpocket also served to allow him to pick up the little dog and clamp its muzzle shut until he could find a treat in the fridge to use as a bribe for friendship.

Darien had gotten away from this encounter with minimal damage, except to his pride, and Mrs. Shepherd seemed to have been too flustered at her dog's actions to even begin to question how the animal had come to be loose. Darien counted that as a win, if a somewhat painful one, and at this point he was more disturbed by that persistently leering Santa on the cabinet than the bite on his leg.

Claire, in her own way, seemed to agree, at least about the bite anyway.

"I'm not sure why you came all the way back here for this," Claire said, "It's barely a scratch."

"See?" Darien directed this smug remark at Hobbes, "I told you I'd live."

"Who can tell with you?" Hobbes sulkily asked, "You get a hangnail and you scream bloody murder, but a cannonball goes through you and you barely flinch."

Truthfully, Darien was in retrospect somewhat embarrassed by his fright of what was obviously a puppy. More severe dogs had chased him, one had almost managed to maul him but succeeded only in leaving a mark on his leg to remember it by. But the pup had seemed a great deal more formidable when he'd been in a room alone, with no way out except through a wall of teeth and muscle. And it had managed to all but throw him down the stairs. That wasn't nothing, though Darien suspected his own panic had been a major contributing factor.

"Neither of those are true," Darien objected, then looked to Claire for support by saying, "Claire, you know neither of those things are true, right?"

Claire was ignoring him, finishing bandaging the injury the dog had inflicted on his calf (this one probably wouldn't scar, and it had cut right over the old scar, nearly obliterating it).

"Oh come on," Darien persisted, "I don't scream- ow!"

"Sorry," Claire said, but she didn't sound sorry and Darien glared at her in annoyance, "That should hold fine. But I don't have to tell you this could have been a lot worse, do I?"

"No," Darien replied.

"How long were you invisible for anyway?" Claire asked, but didn't wait for an answer, grabbing Darien by the wrist and checking the tattoo under his wristband, "Not long? Good," she narrowed her eyes and followed Darien's look up to the Santa and added, "That Santa is _not_ leering at you."

"Yeah?" Darien inquired, reclining in the same chair as he had earlier, gazing up warily at the Santa, "Maybe you should try seeing it from my perspective."

"Honestly, Darien, I don't understand," Claire sighed in evident exasperation, "Even The Official likes Christmas, but you and Bobby-"

"Yeah well, Ol' Charlie never met a dream he didn't want to crush," Darien interrupted, "And what better collective dream to destroy than making people work through the holidays?"

"But you don't even _like_ Christmas," Claire persisted.

"So? Doesn't mean we can't enjoy time off," Hobbes fielded this one, "Especially _paid_ time off."

"Exactly," Darien agreed.

"Alright, I give up. Why do you hate Christmas so much?" Claire asked.

"You don't want the answer to that," Darien replied.

"Nobody does," Hobbes put in, "They just want an opportunity to tell you that your reasons are stupid and selfish and that only a monster would disapprove of annual government-approved extortion."

"Extortion?!" Claire practically gasped in disbelief, "How is Christmas _extortion_?"

"Well," Hobbes replied eagerly, "First you've got your kids. Gotta do their homework and clean their rooms or Santa won't bring any presents. And let's not forget the part where their parents lie to them to their faces about a guy coming down the chimney and leaving random garbage around, then turning around and tellin' 'em not to talk to strangers."

At Hobbes' pause for breath, Claire opened her mouth, but he didn't wait for her to speak.

"And maybe you can excuse that as the kids learning to be well behaved, but how can they know their parents reall mean it in the future when they start talking about politics and religion and whether that boy their little girl has fallen in love with is any good or not after they find out Santa isn't real and their parents lied to 'em for years, eh?"

Claire couldn't think of an immediate response, and Hobbes was by now on a full roll.

"And let's talk about the part where they get older and learn there is no Santa, and they learn to just pester their parents. Demanding gifts. Saying if they don't get this or that, they won't love their parents any more. And things only get worse with adults. 'You get me a present or I won't get you one' and everybody's okay with that, even though you're not talking about gifts anymore, you're talking about commerce and acting like it's the same thing."

"So you're saying that if I give you a present, you won't give me one?" Claire asked.

"I didn't say that," Hobbes answered, "I did _not_ say that... you were gonna give me a present?"

"Did I say that?" Claire asked innocently, crossing her arms with a smug smile, "Well I guess now you'll never know, will you?"

"See? My point exactly," Hobbes said vehemently, pointing a finger at her, "I'm not sayin' it's wrong to give somebody a gift, obviously there's nothing wrong with that, but it's the expectation -the _demand_ \- that they reciprocate, whether they want to or not. It doesn't matter if I like the gift you give me, or if I asked for one or wanted one, I still have to give you one. I never agreed to this, but I have to do it anyway because some guy in a red suit doesn't have the decency to actually exist... and... you were gonna give me a present? For real?"

Claire simply smiled cheekily and avoided making eye contact.

Darien, who had been quiet up to now, abruptly drew attention by speaking.

"I had an aunt once," he began with unusual softness to his voice.

Claire and Hobbes looked at him, but he didn't look at them. In fact, he wasn't looking at the Santa anymore either. He was looking at nothing in particular, but definitely avoiding their eyes as he spoke.

"She ate, drank, slept and breathed Christmas. Hell, she probably even dreamed of sugar plums," he continued, his voice growing a little stronger as he went on, "But what she gave, unceasingly and without bothering to have a list or check it twice, was guilt. I've always thought that was because -instead of Santa Claus- she believed in Death."

He paused, lifted his head, now looking at his audience, who had forgotten their game, startled as they were by the seriousness in Darien's voice, and by the look in his eyes as he remembered this.

"She had an endless refrain, 'this could be my last Christmas.'" Darien laughed once, without humor, then went on "She would pull that line out any time she wasn't getting her way during the holiday season, used it to inspire her relatives to come to her house, help her put up her tree, decorate her yard, bake cookies and wrap presents. Sometimes she even put our presents in cardboard boxes and had us wrap our own presents too."

The bitterness that came into Darien's voice was unmistakable as he continued.

"There was an upside to it for me," Darien said, his tone lightening somewhat for a moment, and becoming tinged with a sweetness as he fondly recalled, "The dying aunt routine got me out of Juvie for the holidays more times than I can remember. That little gray-haired lady could really lay that guilt on thick, had a talent for it. That and knitting," he actually smiled a bit, warmly, as he said, "In addition to being the guilt-bearing relative, she was also the unofficial dispenser of ugly Christmas sweaters that she had knitted herself. As soon as we opened those gifts, she'd really drop the guilt, detailing all the time and effort she'd spent to make those sweaters with her own two hands, and reminding us that -because they were wool- we couldn't just throw them in with the rest of the laundry, and that we'd have to do something to keep the moths away from them."

He paused, and his gaze fell again. Neither Claire nor Hobbes felt that they could say anything. Both of them sensed the impending tragedy as surely as if it had been their own, and they felt as powerless to stop Darien from saying it as he was to go back in time and prevent it from happening.

Darien went on, the words coming faster now, unable to stop, "Then one year my aunt pitched her Last Christmas tent, and none of us came. We'd all gotten older, grown up, found other things to do, made our own groups of friends we wanted to spend the holidays with, and most of us were on such bad terms that we'd have preferred a public hanging to spending the holidays in sight of each other," his voice shook with the final sentence, which fell like a hammer blow, "Well, it turned out that it _was_ her last Christmas, and she'd spent it alone."

He broke off, tilted his head slightly, and then looked up at Claire and Hobbes, who simply looked back at him in silence. Neither of them had anything to say. There was nothing they could say.

"Anyway," Darien said, half-embarassed at his abrupt and unplanned unburdening of painful memory, "I don't think any of us ever celebrated Christmas after that."

"Darien," Claire said, finding her voice somewhat faintly, "I had no idea."

"Yeah, well... it doesn't really matter now. I haven't got anybody left anyway," Darien struggled with a half-smile that couldn't reach his eyes, then gave it up.

"That's not true," Hobbes spoke quickly, "You've got us,"

Darien didn't have to say it, and he didn't, but that was a small consolation prize.

But it was not Darien's way to be depressed. Rapidly he shook off his melancholy as if it were water on the coat of a wet dog. In fact, he did it more rapidly than did either Claire or Hobbes.

"Well," Darien said with sudden cheerfulness that didn't seem to be forced, "I guess Hobbes and I better go have a word with The Official."

"What?" Hobbes asked vaguely, then snapped into the present, "Right. Right!"

Darien and Hobbes left the Keep, and went off down the hall. They paused at the closed door of The Official's office. Neither of them wanted to tackle that tinsel wreath, but they both knew they needed to give an update while they were here.

Darien quickly pulled out his quarter and flipped it, making sure to win.

"Lemme see that," Hobbes demanded suspiciously.

"What, you lose two coin tosses and you immediately assume I'm cheating? Your luck is just bad," Darien said, putting up a front of protest to help cover his tracks.

"My luck is fantastic; gimme the coin," Hobbes replied, holding a hand out, more certain because of Darien's attempt to withhold the coin that it must be a trick (though it had landed on heads this time, and tails the time before; something your average trick coin can't do).

"Come on, Hobbes, don't be a sore loser," Darien further objected, solidifying Hobbes' assumption that there was something wrong with the coin, which he was now holding over his head out of Hobbes' reach, "You lost fair and square; you're just embarrassing yourself."

"Gimme that coin, Fawkes," Hobbes growled warningly, lunging for and missing the quarter.

Darien was having a lot of fun teasing Hobbes, especially knowing the conclusion would be that Hobbes would examine the coin, probably flip it a few times and somehow refuse to admit he was wrong, while at the same time flushing from abashment, shame he would remember the next time he wanted to question Darien's honesty (particularly with the coin). It wasn't nice, Darien knew, but it was fun, and if Santa wanted to complain, Darien would tell him where to stuff that stupid list.

Suddenly, the door swung open, and Eberts stuck his head out, "If you two don't mind-"

He got no further, for The Official shouted through the door, "Fawkes! Hobbes! Quit screwing around out there and come give your report. This isn't a playground and a waste of time is a waste of dime."

Darien cocked his head quizzically as he looked at Hobbes, "Did he just-"

Hobbes looked back, and shrugged, then led the way through the door. They left Eberts struggling to fix the wreath, which had of course leaped off its nail when he'd opened the door.


	7. Lights Are Shining

" _You_ didn't tell us we were looking for your nephew," Darien began, swinging into his preferred chair in front of The Official's desk.

"You didn't need to know," The Official replied.

"If you'd told us, we could have gone straight to your sister's house, told her who we were and gone through all that a lot faster," Darien persisted, and was surprised when Hobbes actually supported him.

"And Fawkes might have avoided getting bitten," Hobbes supplied.

"Getting bitten by a dog was your own fault," The Official said, just as if he'd been there and seen the whole thing, "And if you'd told her you were working for me, Mary would probably have thrown you out."

"About that," Hobbes ventured, "That thing with the dolls. What kinda brother does that?"

"You obviously never had a little sister," The Official replied flatly.

Darien shook his head, "I can't believe your parents had you, looked at that and went 'yeah sure, let's have another.'"

"For your information, _I_ was an adorable baby," The Official said.

"I doubt that," Darien remarked.

"It's true," Eberts interjected, having returned from taming the tinsel, "I've seen his baby pictures."

"Shut up, Eberts!" The Official demanded, before Eberts might offer to show Darien and Hobbes those pictures, which he probably kept in a filing cabinet somewhere.

Darien tried to picture The Official as an adorable baby. Failing at that, he tried to picture The Official as _a_ baby. Realizing his normally expansive imagination could not manage this, he gave up and admitted to himself that -to him- The Official would never be anything other than a middle-aged bureaucrat in a cheap suit sitting behind a desk and denying Hobbes a raise and Darien his freedom.

"Just so we're clear," Darien said, changing the subject, "You did call off the detective, right?"

"What detective?" The Official asked, but there was a merry twinkle in his beady eyes that said he knew exactly what detective, and Darien was unhappy to find that set his mind at ease on the matter.

To his further displeasure, Darien found, creeping into his imagination unbidden, an image of The Official all dressed in red with white fur trim, an enormous beard and crimson cap; beside him loyal Eberts dressed as an elf all in green and carrying a sack over his shoulder the size of himself, in which -no doubt- were a number of the Agency skeletons that Eberts so industriously hid in closets.

Hobbes, clearly not troubled by any such visions, asked another question, "I don't suppose you have any idea who would want to kidnap your nephew?"

"Very few people know he's my nephew," The Official replied stonily, "And I prefer to keep it that way, otherwise the answer to that question would become 'yes.'"

"Ah," Hobbes said, taking the hint with a nod, "Of course."

"But you understand, now, how important this is," The Official said, his voice gaining a threatening edge, "I want that boy found and returned to his mother in the same condition he was stolen in."

Across Darien's mind, there flitted a question as to whether they were to put a dirty diaper on the baby if his diaper had been dirty at the time he was stolen, but he figured if he wanted any counter-agent for Christmas that was something he was better off not asking.

"If you don't find this child," The Official continued menacingly, "You'll be fired so fast it'll make Superman look like a taxi in New York during rush hour, and I don't have to tell you that neither of you could get a job as dishwashers if that happened."

"No sir, you don't," Hobbes agreed, standing up to go, "We'll find Nicky in no time, right, Fawkes?"

"Well it might take _some_ time," Darien replied, getting up more sedately, "After all, we won't get very far if we go around violating traffic laws."

The Official gave him a hooded glare, but Darien for some reason felt less threatened than he had earlier. Maybe it was his recent altercation with something that had real teeth. Maybe it was that he was annoyed that The Official had made him put in more work than was absolutely necessary. Maybe it was just that now he could see -or imagined he could see- a faint hue of fear in the small eyes of his boss.

His conscience roused itself, which annoyed him. As was ever the case when The Official's power was in some way diminished and vulnerability showed itself, Darien failed to be as cold-blooded as he always wanted to imagine himself to be. Despite his unwonted position here, he'd feel compelled to act to The Official's advantage, and restore the balance of power. The Official was now showing weakness, and Darien was stirred to pretend not to notice, and not to lord it over his unloved and unwanted employer, who was often a great deal more like a master than a mere boss, and a miserly one at that.

"We'll find Nicholas," Darien heard himself say almost against his will, "And we'll bring him home."

It was neither the first, nor the last time Darien would come to The Official's aid for a reason greater than his own self-interest, and The Official had never failed to recognize it before. By the slight narrowing of his eyes as anticipated a final line of mockery and then their widening when it did not come, it was clear The Official had recognized it and was -as ever- surprised.

The Official, Darien would bet money, was seldom troubled by a conscience.

Considering where his conscience had gotten him so far, Darien felt that morality was overrated, and whoever had invented that inexplicable sense of right and wrong ought to have been shot. Not in the heart or in the head, but maybe in the hand or something, just to give them an idea of what sort of torment that sort of invention was apt to inflict upon a youngster who was a rebellious thief at heart.

Ever it was clear to him that those without conscience seemed to get the better deal, for they inevitably landed in power, whereas everyone else got arrested, experimented on and used to find family members that didn't belong to them just when everyone else was getting to take a holiday.

Of course, the lively conscience in Darien's soul cheerfully went about its work, pointing out to him that the majority of that wouldn't have happened if he'd just been a nice, law-abiding citizen in the first place and not gone about robbing people's houses. Perhaps the worst part of his undesired job was the fact that it seemed to be making his conscience louder and more articulate by the day. He hated it.

There was nothing for it but to follow Hobbes out of The Official's office, down the hall, out the door, down the sidewalk and to the parking space where Hobbes had left his van, even as Darien's conscience continued to bang around in his head, finding things to scold him about.

"So," Darien ventured, more to distract himself from unwonted introspection than anything, "I guess now we look into the babysitter and housekeeper, since those are the only leads we have."

"Wrong!" Hobbes said, slamming the driver's side door, "We have a better one."

"We do?" Darien asked, his mind scrambling, "Did I miss something?"

"Didn't you hear Mrs. Shepherd when she called off her dog?" Hobbes asked sharply.

"I guess so," Darien replied, "Why?"

"Well I guess not, my friend," Hobbes told him, "Otherwise, you'd have the same idea I do."

"Hobbes, and I mean this as nicely as possible, I have probably never once in my entire life had the same ideas as you have," Darien said flatly.

"When she called off that mutt," Hobbes persisted, "She didn't say 'no' or 'drop it' or 'leave it' or 'bad dog' or anything a normal person would say."

"No?"

"No," Hobbes replied, "She said 'aus.' Not 'out', ' _aus_.'"

Darien shook his head, not comprehending, "So?"

" _So_ , that's German," Hobbes said, "She sound German to you?"

"I don't see the point," Darien confessed.

"The only people who'd teach commands like that are Germans, handlers of German imports and people who've had direct experience with military dogs."

"So?"

"That dog's too young to have come pre-trained, and the way she addressed it with even trying to pull it off you smacks of field experience," Hobbes said, "That innocent housewife act is just that. Our lovely Mrs. Shepherd is hiding something."

"Well," Darien sighed, "Maybe she's related to The Official after all."

"That's what my gut's tellin' me," Hobbes concluded, "How 'bout you?"

"Mine," Darien said, then paused thoughtfully for a second, "Mine's tellin' me we should've had lunch half an hour ago."

"No time for lunch," Hobbes insisted, then relented, "We'll get some tacos on the way or somethin'."

* * *

Even though Hobbes had found a good lead as to why Nicky might have been kidnapped, the matter of whodunnit remained. Citing this and the fact that the contact he had in military intelligence was "shy," Hobbes dropped Darien off at the strip mall where the agency the babysitter had been hired from was based. Darien suspected that Hobbes; "shy" contact probably hated him and would likely drop a healthy layer of personal abuse on top of him before giving him any useful information, and Hobbes' pride made him want to keep Darien from witnessing that.

Darien was always keen on knowing more about Hobbes' past, not only because he was so darn fun to pick on but also because each bit of knowledge Darien acquired allowed him to work that much more effectively with (or against, should the notion hit) his partner. Of course, at this point there wasn't much of relevance that he didn't know. Hobbes was paranoid yes, but he was also a damned good spy and only an idiot with a death wish would take him on in hand-to-hand or weapons combat. Some people might disagree with Darien's assessment, but most of the ones who failed to take Hobbes seriously lived to regret it only because underneath that damaged exterior in dire need of medication was a genuinely nice guy. Not that Hobbes wanted anyone to know that, or that Darien would admit it aloud.

In any case, Hobbes had overruled Darien's every argument that he be allowed to come to the secret meeting too with the simple fact that they had very little time to find this kid. So they'd split up.

Despite its being the middle of December, the temperature at this particular location was in the high fifties, with a lazy wind that seemed unsure of which way it should be blowing. One thing Darien liked about this area was that its winters were somewhere between late and nonexistent and much of the time the only snowmen he saw were of the plastic variety. Darien and cold had never been on particularly good terms and if he wanted snow, he could go on a skiing trip rather than actually live with the stuff.

The strip mall was decked out in its holiday best, including a Mexican restaurant with colorfully stereotypical chili pepper light strings. Of course, this wasn't a high class area, and the decorations were mostly cheap and entirely nailed down so there was no easy way for anyone to steal them.

Darien had never understood the whole 'stealing plastic reindeer' thing. Christmas decorations were generally cheap, not rare and a pain in the ass to transport because they were often big and cumbersome. But there were statistics on the number of snowmen stolen from a given area every year, like there was some sort of worldwide competition for stealing Christmas decorations. There were also the graffiti artists and various other pranksters who set forth in force every holiday season to make a general mess of things, as if destruction and the consequential misery of others was the only thing they knew how to celebrate. Darien liked to think he was a classier criminal than that. He liked to act out and buck authority as much as the next guy, but tormenting the neighbors and unwitting shopkeepers didn't really make a great deal of sense to him.

He hadn't been paying attention at the time Mrs. Shepherd had said which babysitting agency she'd used, but even if there had been more than one agency at this mall, Darien would still have been able to guess that Away in a Manger Sitters and Daycare Center was the one she'd used.

"You've _got_ to be kidding me," Darien muttered to himself, looking at the sign.


	8. Away in a Manger

In addition to a white string of lights framing each window and a lit garland framing the door, there was in one window a decal depicting Santa on one knee kneeling before a baby in a manger, detailed with a star above, the traditional Mary and Joseph standing nearby and shepherd boy with sheep. It continued on the second window with wise men who seemed to be leading reindeer instead of the usual camels, and with each wise man was a Christmas elf carrying a wrapped package. Darien wasn't sure this melding of themes worked very well, but he wasn't here to critique the décor.

Inside, the place looked like almost any office, except that in the lobby section there was a box of toys for anybody bringing their child in with them, and there was a low fence and gate between lobby and desks, presumably to keep toddlers out of the cables. Beyond the office was a glass-panel door, through which Darien could see a number of playrooms with children and sitters keeping track of them. Above all was the theme of the day: Christmas. In the lobby was a relatively small (fake) tree sequestered in a corner, bedecked with unbreakable ornaments and some sort of tinsel substitute that couldn't be pulled apart and swallowed in pieces by roving toddlers, the star topper looked to have been glued on.

Across desks, around glass partitions and over doorways were more lit garlands, and every desk had some sort of personal addition like a snowman snow globe, eight (surprisingly detailed and elaborate) paperclip reindeer pulling a red stapler sleigh, an R2-D2 in a Santa hat and so on. Each play room seemed to have a child-safe tree and a bunch of holiday themed toys like stuffed reindeer and entire nativity sets, and the sitters were wearing headbands or hats that furthered the festive atmosphere. Music was playing, lively Christmas music that sounded like someone from the 60's trying to be ultra-modern and hip. It was like cats scratching on chalkboard to Darien.

With the exception of the first row of desks, which faced front, the desks were arranged so that they faced each other, and the occupants could look to either side to see the playrooms or the door entrance. There was a bell that rang when Darien entered, and it looked like there was another bell attached to the glass door leading to the playrooms. There were also cameras, but it was clear the first defense was that no less than a half dozen people had line of sight to every area. Privacy was apparently not their main concern here, rather they wanted to make sure nobody got in unnoticed. But it looked like there was more of a hall beyond the glass door and windowed wall leading to the back. Probably those were only storage, bathrooms or perhaps records rooms. Darien doubted there was a back entrance to this place.

Once inside, he realized that the inner door was probably locked, and someone at a desk on the other side of the glass was very probably responsible for "buzzing" people in. And what glass it was. It was thick stuff, Darien could tell, not unlike what you got in banks from a professional first glance.

"Hello!" a surprisingly young woman with dyed red hair bordering on burgundy and Christmas tree earrings chirped to him, "What can we do for you?"

Having become preoccupied with trying to remember if he'd ever been inside a daycare building because he wasn't sure any of this was "normal" as well as taking in the simple but effective security measures of the place, Darien was a bit slow off the mark.

"Oh, yes. I'm Agent Fawkes," Darien hurriedly flashed his badge and then flipped it back before the woman could read what it said, "I need to ask some questions about whoever's been babysitting for one of your clients, Rosemary Shepherd? Son, Nicholas Shepherd."

"The police were already here," the woman said, "Normally of course we don't give out information like that, but the client specifically requested that we cooperate with the police. Of course we want to do everything we can to make sure Nicky is brought home safe and sound as soon as possible."

"I'm here for some followup questions," Darien lied smoothly, "I work out of a different department so you know I have to get all the information firsthand. Red tape and all that."

"I see," but she looked wary of this statement, "Do you have some kind of warrant or anything like that?"

"I was really hoping not to have to get one of those," Darien said quickly, "The paperwork on that takes so much time and it's really important to move a missing child case forward as quickly as possible," that sounded good, and was more or less what Hobbes had told him in the van on the way over.

"I'm sorry," the woman said, "But we really can't give information out without some proof that it's legal. We have to protect the privacy of our employees as well as our clients, you understand. But I can assure you that our employees all go through a thorough vetting and training process before we allow them to take on out-of-office clients."

Darien had lost interest the moment she'd started talking, knowing he wasn't going to get anywhere this way, but he said, "I understand. Thanks anyway."

He turned and left, but of course he had no intention of being put off so easily from his objective.

Just to be certain there was no easy way to accomplish this, he went around back of the strip mall in search of a rear entrance to the daycare. It did turn out that the original constructors of the building had put back doors in for every space. Maybe that was a fire regulation, or just a way of avoiding having to walk garbage bags past paying customers. Darien neither knew nor cared. His line of work dealt in how things worked, not why. And in this case, how it worked was not in Darien's favor.

The door was there, yes, but it was steel and had an electronic lock that was burglar-thwarting if you happened to be a low-tech thief like Darien, who didn't even like particularly high-tech safes, much less entire homes secured by electronics. Darien didn't need a crystal ball to know he was looking at the future not only of business security systems, but home systems as well. Electronics of all kinds were getting more prevalent and less expensive every day, and of course everyone was more than ready for the _Star Trek_ future. Of course, Darien knew that the future would not be like _Star Trek_. One day there would be in a thief's set of tools some small and simple device or technique that would allow decent thieves to circumvent even this fine security system. In fact, such things existed already, but were not yet as common as electronic locking mechanisms on doors.

Darien was a member of a dying breed (one nobody but a fiction writer was likely to miss). Even as electronic home security came in, people would begin to keep more and more of their valuables not in safes but in cyberspace. The future of theft belonged to the hacker, something Darien had never been and was unlikely to learn how to be. There would always be petty theft, people breaking into homes and making off with knickknacks for the kicks, but the stealing of physical objects would begin to mean less and less as everyone began to keep electronics that were increasingly cheap, and then began to put their money into online investments instead of expensive paintings and the like.

But the not too distant future of burglary as a career was none of Darien's concern just now.

Leaving the uninviting electronic door, Darien switched on the invisibility and came back around to the front. He could have come back at night with tools for the job of breaking in when the place was empty, but that would lose him a lot of time. So he played the risky game.

It didn't hurt any that this way was also more fun.

There was an imp of mischief in Darien that was ever ready to make an appearance whether the venue was appropriate or not, and he would not deny that it was fun to cause a bit of chaos here and there. So it was with much amusement that he commenced enacting the role of a playful ghost.

He opened the act by pulling open the door, then letting it close. Because he was invisible and no one had been looking up at the time, it sounded as if the bell had rung of its own accord. None of the people at the desks seemed to think the door had actually opened, and apparently wrote it off as a fluke. Clearly they were not terribly imaginative or curious people, and Darien would have to try harder.

Really he only needed one person to leave her desk, but ideally everybody would get in on the act, otherwise they might see that one of the computers was beginning to do things on its own when Darien tried to look up the information he was seeking.

But Darien knew he had a critical advantage. Something called inattentional blindness, among other names. It was actually not any sort of visual deficit in the usual sense at all. It was merely a few quirks of the brain combined to render a person blind to the obvious.

One was that people did not see things they did not expect to see. They could open a fridge and look right at a gallon of milk, yet conclude there was no milk in the fridge simply because they had believed there was no milk when they opened it. A second look might even confirm the first because the brain's interpretation of reality had been reinforced by the first look, and the eyes were overruled by the mind.

But someone might just as easily open the fridge and see the milk because it really was there.

A second component was needed to make the trick work.

This second component dealt in the fact that the human brain could only interpret so much stimulus at a time. Overload it, and it would begin to overlook and ignore details, prioritizing what it passed on to the conscious mind. This bit of psychology makes it possible to hear someone speaking your name over the sound of a noisy crowd, or to read a book while a party goes on unnoticed around you, or tune out a boring person so that their sentences become mostly just an endless droning noise and you later will have trouble recalling (or be totally unable to recall) what they said to you. It's also what allows people to trick themselves into thinking they can effectively multitask, when what they are actually doing is switching rapidly back and forth between tasks.

Darien opened and closed the door again.

Hearing the bell made some people look up every time. Others were too engrossed in their phone calls or computer data to pay any attention. Darien opened and closed the door a few more times, waiting a few moments each time until the attention of his audience began to waver.

Timing is everything, as any performer can tell you. Darien's timing was impeccable. And finally he achieved the result he was after when one of the women at the front desks became annoyed and curious, and she got up to investigate. Whereupon Darien opened the door, ran through it rapidly, and went directly to the Christmas tree in the corner, which he promptly knocked over. The woman near the door was convinced a stiff wind had suddenly blown through, even though it would take something like gale forces to push open the door and knock over the tree. But because she believed that was what she had felt, she ignored the obvious. Fascinatingly, so too did the other people in the office.

They saw the tree go down, but also saw their co-worker was not acting as if she'd seen a ghost, so they naturally assumed there was a reasonable explanation for why the tree had fallen over, even though they had no proof of it at all save that one of their number was unperturbed. But it did get several of them up to come help right the tree and retrieve the ornaments which had scattered when the tree fell over. Darien suspected by their nonchalance that children had knocked the tree over frequently and this minor cleanup was nothing out of the ordinary to them. In part because one of them seemed to know what had happened by her manner, and in part because it was a normal occurrence, none of them appeared to question the cause of it the event.

Rather than marvel at the gullibility of human nature, Darien hopped the child gate and went to the nearest computer. He was not remotely skilled with computers, and this was a system with which he was unfamiliar, so he had to do some random clicking around before things began to make sense to him. At regular intervals he looked over to see how the cleanup project was coming, and he tried to keep listening to what was going on across the room while finding what he was looking for.

This was going to have to be a short act; the tree wouldn't keep those people busy for long.


	9. Neither Say nor Sing

Though Darien lacked a huge amount of the training and skills a real secret agent needed, not the least of which was physical self-defense, he had come from a style of life where seconds counted almost as much as precision. To get out of the daycare without being discovered required both.

Fortunately, for all the security and safeguards set up by the daycare, their computers were wide open. Of course, the computers had just been in use. In any case, the only trouble Darien had with the computers was figuring out their set up, and they granted him extra help there as well as they'd clearly been set up for people who were not tech savvy.

Darien needed that extra edge, because speed was going to be the difference between getting away clean and getting caught in the surge of daycare employees returning to their desks once they'd finished putting the tree to rights. That was a spot Darien didn't want to be in.

So long as he got out without anyone noticing his use of the computer or bumping into him, they would likely write the whole incident off as a freak gust of wind. But if someone came into sharp contact with a body they couldn't see... well that was a whole other ball game. Particularly if Darien himself was startled by the occurrence. Such an upset could trigger his invisibility, but it could also switch it back off. Basically whenever the Gland sensed Darien felt threatened, it would basically toggle the quicksilver switch. That meant, if he was already invisible, his camouflage would fail.

Of course, even if he just obsessed on the possibility of something going wrong to the point of panic, the invisibility would also fail, so he couldn't just anticipate something going wrong and therefore avoid the jarring impact of surprise. He had to believe that he was perfectly safe in his invisibility to avoid accidentally upsetting the Gland, which was a capricious friend at the best of times. Trusting so completely something so inherently unstable felt like a kind of madness in itself. But that was just how life worked in Darien's new reality as a one-of-a-kind secret agent for the government.

 _Talk about faith in what you can't see_ , Darien thought, to his own grim amusement.

Finding what he was looking for in a search, Darien quickly scanned the page, trying to memorize as much as he could in the seconds he had. He couldn't print this out and take it with him, he had to learn it, and remember it. As he was learning the arts of con and theft, Darien had met a number of people with keen photographic memories, but he'd had to do it the hard way. He had good visual memory, but he had to make the effort to remember what he'd seen, and that took more than a couple of seconds.

As he was confirming what he was seeing, Darien's concentration wavered just for a moment, and he forgot to keep constant check on what was going on with the tree. The sound of the baby gate clicking open was the first and only warning he heard. Looking up, he saw the daycare workers were coming one by one through the gate. Swiftly moving away from the desk, careful not to disturb the chair, Darien looked for a space to put himself where he wouldn't be in the way of the returning employees. The sleek, ergonomically designed office had not an extra inch to spare, but fortunately that good design included space to walk behind the chairs when people were at their desks, and Darien dodged out of the way just as someone breezed through where he'd been standing a moment before.

Edging around the employees, Darien managed to hurdle the baby gate quietly enough that the Christmas music covered the sound of his landing. But there was nothing he could do about the doorbell when he went through. He made a mad dash through the door and didn't stop running until he was out of the parking lot. Safely ensconced behind a hedge, he let the quicksilver flakes slough off, then stood up and nonchalantly went to the nearest sidewalk and began to walk along it as if he had come some little distance and still had a ways to go before he got where he was headed.

If the daycare workers went to the door to check what was the matter, Darien didn't see them because he'd cut around the side of the strip even as he crossed the parking lot, leaving him safely out of view. He'd done it due to long years of habit established before he had the Gland to help him. Get out of range, get out of sight, and assume a normal aspect that won't draw attention.

What he'd learned was that Mrs. Shepherd's babysitter of choice was one Bethany Davis. Under ordinary circumstances, there wasn't anything too special about that name. Under these peculiar conditions, to Darien it seemed an almost uncanny coincidence.

Darien had also discovered that Miss Davis had worked for Away in a Manger for the past six years, first as a daycare employee and then becoming an approved off-site babysitter about two years prior. It wasn't exactly a perfect alibi, but it sure was a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest innocence. She'd become a babysitter long before Nicky was ever born, much less when the Shepherds adopted him. If she was a kidnapper, she'd waited a very long time before acting on whatever impulse drove people to steal children. If she was a spy, her placement was an odd one. From what Darien had seen, the clients were not necessarily ludicrously wealthy or politically powerful people.

He'd made a mental note of her address anyhow, just in case, but really he didn't expect to be checking her out any more than he already had. Hobbes might see it differently, however, and Hobbes was the one of them with extensive experience in the spying industry.

It was at this point that Darien realized he and Hobbes had made no arrangements for his being picked up. Darien knew he couldn't afford to hang out near the mall. The people at the daycare had seen him and would probably remember him, at least in the short term.

He hadn't exactly been dressed for the role, and his usual style trended more towards the flamboyant at times than the undercover. He was wearing one of his more subdued outfits right now, but it didn't exactly scream, "I'm a detective working a kidnapping case." They would also be extra alert for anything unusual thanks to his impersonation of a ghost in their office, because that's just how people were when they encountered anything thoroughly unexpected and bizarre. They were just more watchful for anything even mildly unusual for awhile after that.

Since he was already out here anyway, Darien decided he might as well pay a visit to the housekeeper. Hobbes had given him a scrap of paper on which was written her name and address. Unlike the babysitter, the housekeeper wasn't a part of any company, but simply worked alone.

Ester Cassiel was her name, and she lived just a few blocks away.

The strip mall was just on the outside of a low-cost neighborhood, with square houses on small lots packed together almost like sardines. Walking the street Mrs. Cassiel lived on was a peculiar feeling, because the houses were set higher than the street, so it felt a little like he was walking in a ditch. The closed-in feeling of the street was emphasized by the fact that the postage stamp lawns were filled to capacity by inflatable Santas, plastic snowmen, light-up reindeer and painted wood nativity scenes.

Some of the residents waxed even more colorful, featuring popular film and book characters often dressed as Santa, reindeer or the aforementioned people from the nativity scenes. Everybody wanted their particular house to stand out, and as a consequence none of them did. Even at night the street would have looked garish, but during the day it just looked completely cluttered, like each house on the street was about to have a garage sale. Darien appreciated a lot of flash in art, but this wasn't art, it was more of a real-life game of Tetris, each resident trying to fit as many holiday-themed objects onto his or her lawn and house as was humanly possible.

Except for the house of Mrs. Cassiel. Her lawn was blessedly free of cheap decorations, the single tree in the center wrapped in but a single string of blue Christmas lights. The roof had been hung with icicle lights of white and blue, and a large white-lit Christmas Star had been attached to the garage door. Other than that, there was only a holly wreath hung on the front door. It wasn't a lot, but the yard and house were too small to comfortably support attempts at a more elaborate or lavish display.

When Darien knocked at the door, he was somewhat surprised by the person who answered it. Well-versed in the stereotype, and having seen it in real life enough times to count it as valid, Darien had expected a small, compactly built, middle-aged Hispanic woman speaking broken English. But the woman who answered the door corresponded to only one of those details.

"Hello?" She _was_ Hispanic. But she was fairly tall, slender, young, and her English was flawless, if slightly accented.

"Mrs. Cassiel?" Darien asked.

"Yes? May I help you?" she inquired, and Darien immediately picked out the trained quality of her voice, the sound of someone who had learned to speak with absolute control over volume and inflection, as an actress (particularly on stage) might.

It was a skill highly appreciated by con artists, because precisely the right intonation was the difference between sounding politely interested and disturbingly obsessed. The sound of polite but detached inquiry was too perfect to be all natural, this woman had obviously had some vocal training. That in itself was not suspicious really, any number of people had taken speech classes, particularly if English wasn't their first language but they were (or wished to become) naturalized citizens.

"My name is Darien Fawkes," Darien said, and quickly flashed his badge to make sure she didn't have time to read that he worked (officially) for the Department of Fish & Game, "I'm following up leads on a case. I was told that you keep house for one Mrs. Rosemary Shepherd and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions."

"What is this about?" Mrs. Cassiel asked, her tone and expression both guarded after seeing the badge.

"Mrs. Shepherd's son, Nicholas, has gone missing, and it's possible you may have seen or heard something that will help us to find him."

Mrs. Cassiel regarded him with new wariness, "I have not been to clean the Shepherd's house since last week, and you can check that with Mrs. Shepherd."

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Mrs. Cassiel," Darien assured her, "But it's possible you may have seen someone hanging around, a vehicle that didn't seem to belong, someone coming and claiming to be an inspector or repairman of some kind, maybe a new gardener, something like that."

Mrs. Cassiel was shaking her head, "No, I didn't see anyone..." then her eyes widened slightly as she appeared to recall something, "There was a pest control van. I clean several houses on that street, and I remember that van being a nuisance because it kept parking at the end of driveways and front walks so I had to go around it and consequently step on the grass. People are very particular about their lawns, and it looks bad if you walk on their grass."

"Do you by any chance remember what the company name on the van was?"

She frowned, "I mostly noticed it was a big, ugly shade of yellow, and that it had a hideous roach painted on the side. Very ugly in a fashionable neighborhood," she hesitated, then her face brightened, "Oh yes, I remember. It was Kill-o-Zap Professional Pest Control."

"Kill-o-Zap?" Darien repeated, thinking that had to be some kind of copyright violation.

"Yes," Mrs. Cassiel nodded assertively.

Darien had pulled out a notepad to look more professional himself, and he was in fact taking notes.

"And do you remember anything about what the driver of the van looked like, or anyone that seemed to be working from the van?" Darien asked.

She shook her head, and her face fell a little as she said in some embarrassment, "I don't remember. I don't pay much attention to how people look. I notice more how they are dressed."

"Do you remember how these people were dressed?" Darien asked.

"Sort of tan jumpsuits," she said quickly, "clean black boots, one of them had a very white cap he wore all the time, the other one didn't wear a hat."

"Both men?" Darien inquired quickly, seizing on the detail, "And just two of them?"

She seemed to think that over a moment, then nodded, "I think so. Only two at a time anyway. I don't know if it was always the same two or not."

Sporadic memory of details, remembered from odd prompting angles were normal for most people, particularly with regards to something random and only slightly odd they'd seen. But it was also normal for the talented liar. Only a very amateurish con artist remembered lots of detail in order without prompting. But then too, so did only slightly exceptional people with keen memories.

If this was a con, it was a very respectable performance. Though of course anyone passing themselves off as a house-worker like a maid, gardener or cook would know that the police would sooner or later come to question them, so if the van was a red herring it was probably not prepared for him on the spot.

Speaking of, Darien turned on reflection to the fact that Mrs. Cassiel had not looked particularly worried or surprised to hear that Nicholas was missing. She had appeared wary, but that had come in response to his badge more than anything. Most people felt uneasy when questioned by a badge.

"Has anyone else been here, asking about the Shepherds?" Darien asked.

"No," Mrs. Cassiel replied, "Should there have been?"

"I guess he'll be by later," Darien said quickly, "We've got people from multiple departments all working kind of independently. Making sure we cover all the angles thoroughly, you see."

"I see," Mrs. Cassiel answered, but there seemed to be a new note of suspicion in her voice.

Darien asked a few more questions, then carefully extricated himself from the encounter. Mrs. Cassiel was more guarded for the rest of the conversation, seemingly starting to wonder just what she'd seen on that badge she'd barely gotten a glimpse of anyway. But she apparently wasn't so suspicious that she refused to answer any more questions or demanded to see his badge again.

Of course, it was possible that what Darien read as suspicion might well be worry that she was about to be exposed as a kidnapper. But Darien didn't think so. Like Miss Davis, Mrs. Cassiel had worked for the Shepherds for quite a while with no apparent issues, and it would be a small matter to check out whether she really worked as housekeeper at other houses on the same street.

Frankly, Darien didn't like either woman as a kidnapper, but he wasn't sure where that left him. At least he'd picked up another possible lead with the pest control van anyway, so it wasn't a total loss.


	10. Santa's Gonna Come

Darien left the neighborhood of Mrs. Cassiel, and headed back into town.

A long walk back to The Agency didn't particularly bother him. Though a steadfast city-dweller by nature, Darien nonetheless did enjoy the outdoors, particularly where he never had to worry about snow. If anyone had asked him, Darien would have bet that there would be less running in the life of a spy who could just turn invisible whenever trouble started to come his way, but the reality was that, if anything, Darien had actually been doing a lot _more_ running.

Being naturally athletic, even hyper-active according to many of his teachers during his school years, Darien took to running like a duck to water, though he did sometimes overreach his abilities by demanding some feat of agility his body wasn't able to accomplish, and that tended to result in minor injuries like sprains, but Darien stubbornly refused to learn from experience what he could and could not physically do. It was how his innately competitive nature manifested itself.

Not very interested in sports as anything more than a casual diversion, Darien most often had pitted himself against either himself or perhaps the local law enforcement. For some reason, he preferred trying to outsmart and outrun the cops to "honest competition." Now, of course, he was usually trying to outrun the bullets of terrorists of one sort or another trying to kill him. In fairness to his new lifestyle, it had been awhile since he'd felt like seeing if he could outrun a policeman on foot after snatching a purse. In fact, purse snatching was beneath his dignity these days. That was a crime fit for a teenager who hadn't gotten his act together, and Darien was far beyond that.

So a lengthy walk back to The Agency was practically nothing. Besides which, he knew that Hobbes would probably be coming back along the same route, and if they met up Darien could get a ride in the van. For reasons he wasn't yet conscious of, Darien had developed an aversion to taxis and buses (not that The Official would have allowed him to take either up to the front door of The Agency anyway).

As Darien was entering a tightly packed shopping district of smalltime shops, another skill he'd been developing most of his life but which had come into sharp focus since his employment by The Agency kicked in. He felt that someone was watching him in a more than casual way.

The instinct for eyes following your movements was present in everyone, though most never learned to pay attention to it and thought it a purely animal trait. But Darien had practiced listening in to this peculiar sense.

It would not interest him to know that numerous studies indicated that you could only sense someone watching you if they were somewhere in your line of sight (though from a surprising distance even through a crowd or other field of chaos), though subconsciously you might pick up a sound from behind you, or see a small reflection in a window or other reflective surface that could trigger you to feel like you were being watched. Darien might have _contested_ these scientific conclusions, but he wouldn't have been _interested_ in them. This was largely because, had anyone asked, he would have said that the explanation was far too simplified to explain away every instance in which someone sensed they were being watched. But it was also because it interested him less why and how things worked; he found the fact that they _did_ work quite sufficient for his purposes.

In fact, being a pretty bright child, Darien had used this awareness of whether he was being watched or not to confirm in his own mind that Santa Claus wasn't real. The whole 'he sees you when you're sleeping' bit kind of gave it away for him. If someone was watching him all the time, wouldn't he know it? Of course, once he got older, he realized the sense was far from infallible. Even with his extensive experience in the matter, there were times Darien felt he was being watched when he wasn't, and times he was either too tired or too distracted to realize he was.

However, in this case, he opted to believe his sense, rather than suspect himself of being paranoid. Better paranoid than dead was a lesson he was fast learning from Hobbes. He wasn't sure it was necessarily a good lesson to learn, but he was learning it anyway, almost against his will.

Thus he surreptitiously began to look around for who might be watching him, and where from.

The shops were all decorated, and provided distractions for his eye. The thing about Christmas decorations was that they purposely stood out, usually rather gaudily, providing a veritable bedlam of color and flair, flash and light to confuse the eye. Overwhelmingly, there was just this overt message that it was THE Holiday Season and you'd better be consciously aware of that at all times. It was difficult to even pick out any single decoration because they all just sort of blended together in a pattern that was as confusing to humans as the stripes of zebra were said to be for lions.

Making matters worse, the bell ringing Santas were out in force, and every one of them was eager to catch the eye of any person who seemed to be looking around, making it nearly impossible to tell whether any of them had been looking his way before he started scanning the area or if their attention was drawn because he stood out to them as someone who did not have a singular destination in mind.

Unable to pick out who was looking at him, or if any of these late afternoon shoppers on the sidewalks were actually following him, Darien opted for caution nonetheless. Careful to avoid looking like he was trying to hurry, Darien sought a corner or alley or some other spot out of sight of the masses.

If he turned invisible in the middle of a crowd, not only would everyone at The Agency have a fit, but his blown cover would mean that people from every branch of the government would be looking for a piece of him, every one of them would want to take control of the I-Man project. Not to mention all the agencies in other countries, who'd want an invisible man for themselves.

Darien enjoyed popularity, but he didn't especially want to be the object of a tug-of-war between government agencies, and he especially didn't want to find himself in the hands of strangers looking to do who knew what with him. The Agency was bad enough, but at least he had a pretty good idea as to what made everybody there tick, and they didn't have him locked up in some basement somewhere. At least The Agency was ostensibly letting him look for a way out.

And, while he was no patriot, Darien certainly didn't want to find himself in the hands of a foreign agency. There were too many unknowns there, and too high a chance that any foreign agency that went after him would do it using untoward means, and without honest motives. And of course that wasn't even counting the terrorists or potential terrorists who'd literally kill to get someone like Darien on their hands so they could try to use him for their own purposes.

So no, turning invisible in full view of God and everybody would not be a good plan.

At the end of the block, Darien found the cover he'd been looking for. In the way that old shopping districts sometimes did, all the stores faced one street. Darien had turned onto what was effectively a side street, between this block and the next. It featured the windowless sides of the shops on either side of the street, and a number of parallel parking spaces.

It wasn't a busy day, or a busy time of day, but Darien nonetheless paused to be sure there weren't any pedestrians or drivers immediately in view who'd notice his abrupt disappearing act. Unfortunately, the momentary pause proved to be his undoing, as a big black SUV came skulking around the corner.

Darien spotted the driver even as the driver spotted him.

"Ah crap."

In that moment of eye contact, the driver realized Darien knew he was being followed, and Darien realized this was who was following him. Not knowing whether or not these people knew he could turn invisible, Darien opted to let them stay in the dark, and didn't turn quicksilver when he whirled and took off at a run down the sidewalk. The time for sneaking had passed. Now it was time to bolt.

From out of the side of the SUV leaped a pair of men, who heavily trundled in pursuit of him. From the sound of them (Darien didn't dare take the time to look back), the spectacle would look amusingly like a couple of St. Bernards pursuing a spring-hare. Darien was a bit unhappy with the comparison, because he knew that these particular Bernards had what was for all practical purposes a mobile brick wall roaring to their aid. The SUV was of course plunging down the street the moment it had disgorged its excess baggage, and it was a lot faster than Darien.

Fortunately for him, it was a short street, and Darien cornered a bit better than either of his pursuers, or the SUV for that matter. Unfortunately, he was now at the back of all those shops, and there wasn't a soul in sight on either side of the street. Not that Darien wanted a crowd of spectators, but often witnesses discouraged kidnappers, even government approved ones.

But there was no one here to see.

It did not occur to Darien to wonder who was chasing him or why. Foolish questions like that would keep for a later time. Right now, his only thoughts were related to his immediate survival. Not that he knew the people after him wished to kill him or even to harm him, but it was the sort of thing he had learned to assume. To do otherwise was to invite death. And if there was one thing Darien sought to avoid above all else, it was death, either to himself or to anyone else. Death was the ultimate evil terror in his mind, and he wanted nothing to do with it.

But avoiding his pursuers wasn't an easy ask. Though Darien had slipped around the corner a fraction of a second ahead of the SUV, and a good three seconds ahead of the men on foot, he had failed to use that time to quicksilver. The reason for this was absurdly simple.

At the start of the project, simply getting Darien's heart rate up had been enough to trigger the Gland. That could still potentially happen. But the Gland was a little bit more like a wild animal than like a gland, and in a way it had been trained even as Darien had. The more comfortable the Gland got in his brain, the more it seemed able to decide whether or not he wanted to be quicksilvered at any given moment. So even though he had fled, and sudden fright at his pursuit had certainly jumped his heart rate up and released the sort of chemicals into his body that always came when a person became frightened, the Gland had not acted because _he hadn't told it to_.

The level of control Darien had over the Gland was not consistent, but it was remarkable nonetheless. He had rapidly surpassed all expectations in the early testing phases, accomplishing feats that his brother, Kevin -who had designed the Gland- had been convinced were flatly impossible. In fact, the only real limitations Darien encountered had to do with the imperfection of the Gland (hence the need for counter-agent), and his own variable mood and peculiar psychology.

In this case, when fear of being spotted first set in, Darien had subconsciously instructed the Gland not to do anything because he didn't want to go invisible in full view of a horde of Christmas shoppers. He had not changed that instruction when he'd fled, in part because he'd actually been hoping to find someone to provide the protection that only a witness to a crime can.

By the time he realized there wasn't, it was already too late, as the SUV had come around the corner and the men chasing him were only a beat behind.

Darien stood numbly for a moment. He heard the running feet behind him slowing, apparently mistaking his stillness for despair. In reality, Darien's mind was assessing his limited options in that second, and deciding which it liked best. In truth, none of them were good. Darien could run down this street, testing the back doors of all those shops in the hopes that one might be unlocked, with each stop costing him time and therefore distance. He could of course take the risk of quicksilvering, assuming his pursuers knew already what he could do. Or, and this was the option he ultimately chose, he could cut across this back street and return to the side street at the next block, hoping for witnesses, or to gain distance, or for the next corner to bring him around to the front of more shops where there would assuredly be the relative safety of the shopping crowds.

This moment's hesitation would have proven too long, had not the men pursuing him mistaken indecision for surrender and slowed down as they anticipated their inevitable triumph.

In a flash, Darien had turned back, dodging to the far side of a parked car in order to place it between himself and his startled pursuers, run around behind the SUV and dashed across the street. In the corner of his eye, he had seen that the two men were dressed as a couple of Santas. Very possibly one or both of them had been on the street when Darien had first felt that prickle of paranoia, and had gotten into the SUV only as Darien began to flee. Their suits had provided them cover before, but now impeded their progress, being heavy and cumbersome to move about in.

By cutting back the way he had, Darien had forced them to try and turn to catch him on the way, and by going behind the SUV, he insured it would not run him over as he crossed the street. Valuable seconds were gained while the faux Santas and their black sleigh got turned around. Darien took those seconds and literally ran with them. He would have made it around the corner too, had not a second SUV suddenly come around the corner and disgorged two additional Santas.

Darien skidded to a stop and looked from one group to the other, as the Santas closed in menacingly.

There was nowhere for him to go.


	11. Sleep Surround You

Being cornered was not a new situation for Darien. Aside from that last time with the geriatric, Darien had never been caught mid-crime, but had always been pursued relentlessly afterward. He had been arrested more times than he'd been convicted, making the three strikes on his record a mere fraction of the number of times he'd been chased by the police. Darien had also escaped unscathed a number of times, but usually that meant the police had never chased him at all. Chase, in Darien's experience, led almost inevitably to capture. Once you were being chased, you had already lost.

Surrender was against his nature, as was the admission of wrongdoing, and those two combined to make him run every time, regardless of the odds against escaping. He just _had_ to try. Ever a fan of the classics, Darien sided with Douglas Adams' famous character Zaphod Beeblebrox in thinking that as discretion was the better part of valor, cowardice was the better part of discretion, and he had valiantly hid himself in any number of closets as a result. But once found and cornered, Darien's first choice was not to resort to a violent last stand, but more a whining protest.

Acting courageously (or selflessly, for that matter) was new to him, and he wasn't very good at it.

Thus when Darien saw and accepted that he could not get away, he began to talk. Or to babble, really.

"Look, fellas, I'm sure we can work this out. If this is about all those times I stole my brother's Christmas presents and broke them, I'm really sorry about that. I was a kid, I was greedy, I didn't know any better," despite a sense of panic at the closing in of the strangers, Darien kept his wits and sense of humor about him, and the fact that they were dressed as Santas provoked a plethora of ridiculous comments and statements, which he unleashed in an unchecked flood, "And, and that time I told Susie Derkins that you weren't real, I was only trying to impress her. I didn't mean to make her cry!"

Two of the Santas briefly checked themselves. The name was clearly familiar to them, but the context made retrieving the reason for that somewhat difficult, since they obviously didn't have comic strips at the forefront of their minds. Darien didn't give them time to sort it out.

"And, you know, I haven't really been hiding from you, it's just that where I live doesn't have any chimneys," Darien carefully kept whether he lived in a house or an apartment to himself, just in case these people didn't know where he lived already and he was somehow able to go home after this, "And, you know, my penmanship is awful, all my teachers said so-"

This proved to be the end of Darien's speech for a time, as the four Santas all pounced on him. Though he made no real attempt to visit violence upon them (primarily because he was pathetically bad at it), he did thrash in a frantic final bid for freedom, but they bore him to the ground and one tossed a bag over his head. The one thing he gathered about this was that the bag had a powerful odor to it and he felt like he was choking. Then things began to get a bit dizzying and even nauseating, and he knew that smell had to be some kind of anesthetic. Alone in the suffocating dark, he collapsed rapidly and knew nothing more for awhile.

* * *

Something Darien had begun to grow used to since the Gland had become a loathsome aspect of his existence was awakening with some confusion as to where he was and how he'd got there. Even aside from the not infrequent bonks on the head that resulted in periods of unconsciousness that came as a part of his new line of work, often when he received counter-agent after being sunk in Madness, he would come back from it disoriented, not quite remembering what he'd been doing for some minutes after the shot took effect. It also wasn't uncommon for him to actually lose consciousness after the strain of losing his hold on sanity for seconds or even minutes.

And so it was with no great deal of panic that Darien awakened unsure of where he was or what was going on. In fact the main thing that bothered him was the bag over his head. Since his brief stint as a blind man a scant few months ago, Darien had hated not being able to see above almost all else.

His first act of conscious will was to try and extricate himself from the bag, at which point he realized his hands were tied behind his back. Tied, not cuffed. This distinction was, for someone who had been repeatedly arrested by the police, an important one. Policemen used cuffs, or possibly zip ties if they should happen to arrest too many people for the number of cuffs they were carrying. They did not, in Darien's experience, use anything else. This felt like... probably not rope. Maybe cord of some kind.

Not that Darien had expected to be kidnapped by policemen (he could think of no instance where he'd been drugged or literally bagged by any policeman), but government agents tended to also carry cuffs or zip ties with them, and Darien had definitely been picked up by agents. In fact, he had first come to The Agency with a bag over his head, for no reason that he was later able to accept as true.

Darien didn't get very far into his thought processes before he was again overcome by the drug saturated fabric of the bag over his head, and fell again into unknowing blackness.

* * *

The next time Darien regained consciousness, someone had had the courtesy to take the bag off his head and sit him in a chair. But his hands were still tied and, looking around, he still didn't have any idea as to where he was. He could tell of course that he was sitting in a chair, and that he was in a room, but he'd sat in lots of chairs and been in lots of rooms, so that really didn't narrow it down a great deal.

It did remind him a bit of The Official's office. Except without the windows. Or the class.

Gradually it came to him that he really didn't feel very good. It was more instinct that anything that made him twist around to try and see the inside of his wrist over his shoulder, fearing above all that the snake's head was about to go red. It was at this point that he realized that the tie at his wrist also bound him to the chair itself. But the snake wasn't even mostly red, and he could have figured that out and saved himself the strain if he'd taken another few breaths and sorted out what part of him felt bad and in what way. Mentally, he was as sound as he ever got.

No, the bad feeling was from a mismanaged dose of anesthetic, which left him feeling a little bit loopy and sick to his stomach. Once he realized that's all it was, he calmed down and got hold of himself.

He took another look around the office. Closed doors, cheap desk, shoddily constructed chairs. It wouldn't be hard to mistake this for The Official's office. But the lack of windows was a dead giveaway. The coldness of the room was another clue. The Agency was always looking to reduce costs, and one of the things to be attacked most frequently was the air conditioning. Darien had good reason to think this was the same day he'd been kidnapped, and it was much warmer outside than it was in this room, which meant someone was probably running the cooling system (the fact he could hear air blowing through the vent in the wall confirmed it). Another clue was that the walls were definitely a different shade of boring (specifically, they were gray instead of beige).

A final, very definite clue, was that the place smelled like cigarette smoke. Really cheap cigarette smoke, trapped in a poorly ventilated building. The Official gave off this vibe like he ought to be smoking a big black cigar at all times, but if he smoked at all, Darien hadn't been clued in to it.

Darien had never let smoking bother him before, but just now the smell of cigarettes combined with the slightly sick feeling left by the overdose of anesthetic to make him feel nauseous. Naturally, he didn't enjoy this at all, and it added to his growing discomfort with his present circumstances.

Facing the front of the cheap desk, Darien noticed that there were two mantel ornaments sitting at it corners like colorful gargoyles. They were both Santas, but one had certain angelic characteristics and was holding a scroll list with the heading of 'Nice' whereas the other one had a distinct demonic aspect and a 'Naughty' list. Both looked thoroughly gleeful, but there was a slightly foolish cant to the angel Santa, and a sinister cunning cut to the devil Santa. If not for the disagreeable circumstances they might have been amusing. As it was, they just seemed creepy. Darien tried to ignore them.

He looked around again as best he could from his chair, wondering if there were any security cameras in here. The Agency was crawling with cameras, only some of which he'd managed to identify. If there were any in here, he wanted to be careful about what he did or said, even though there didn't seem to be any people around nearby. For instance, he didn't want to quicksilver only to find out they had someone watching security footage in the other room. Then not only wouldn't it help him escape, these people would know he could turn invisible. Assuming, of course, that they didn't already know that.

After looking around, Darien hadn't spotted any cameras. But he did still feel like he was being watched, and his gaze returned to the Santas on the desk. It occurred to him that those were about the right size to hide a camera in, though he didn't at the moment see any point the lens could conceivably be looking out from on either figure.

Still, almost no sooner had Darien decided that the devil Santa was the one that made him feel particularly like he was being watched than one of the doors to the room opened and a man walked in.

Tall, lanky and dangerous were the first three descriptive terms that came to Darien as the man crossed the room, went to the desk and sat in the chair behind it. That last term was not so much seen as sensed, though perhaps being kidnapped had made Darien prejudiced on this point.

"Have you ever thought about submitting an application to the Ministry of Silly Walks?" Darien asked, "If you go out and come in again, I'll tell you if they're likely to give you a grant to develop yours."

The man, hands folded neatly on the desk, looked at Darien in cold, humorless fashion, like a left-open freezer without any ice cream in it. Darien decided that he had one of those faces that would probably break into a thousand pieces if he so much as attempted a smile.

"You were seen," the man began, once he was satisfied that Darien didn't have any other smart remarks he'd like to make, "Questioning the Shepherd woman. But you're not police."

"I'm not?" Darien inquired in mock surprise, "Oh gee, then what am I?"

"That," the man replied in his irritatingly clipped way, "Is what you are going to tell us."

"Really?" Darien persisted lightly, "Well I'm glad you know what I'm going to do, because really I don't most of the time until after I do it. I'm thinking about seeing a shrink, but they're so-"

"Why did you go to see the Shepherd woman?" the man interrupted impatiently.

"Well, you see, I was in this van," Darien began, "And since it had stopped in front of the house, I figured I might as well go inside and meet the dog."

"The dog?" the man asked, "Is that supposed to be some kind of derogatory remark?"

"No, she actually has a dog. Little, friendly black mutt. We had a great time playing on the stairs."

The key to any good lie, of course, was to mix in an ample dose of truth, ideally in such a way that the truth was suspected while the lie was taken at face value. Darien was mixing good lying with bad lying, for no particular reason other than that he didn't want this man -or any of his goons, wherever they were- to know how much Darien knew, or how competent he was. Ideally, they would think he was a (probably clueless) idiot, and treat him accordingly. That would make it much easier to figure out what they wanted with him, and also to escape should the opportunity present itself.

"Come now, Agent Fawkes," the man said, "You don't seriously expect me to believe that, do you? Really. What does the..." he pulled Darien's ID card, lifted during Darien's period of unconsciousness, out of his pocket and read, "Department of Fish & Game want with the Shepherds?"

"Well..." Darien scrambled for a good line, and found one, "We got a tip they'd killed two game wardens, seven hunters and a cow on a hunting expedition, and of course we had to look into that because cows are out of season right now."

Apparently Darien had delivered this ludicrous speech with a degree of sincerity he hadn't managed earlier, because the man peered at him rather seriously, like a vulture looking for a way into a carcass.

"Are you on any medication at present, Agent Fawkes?" the man asked.

"That seems rather personal, don't you think?" Darien asked.

This provoked a satisfyingly annoyed sigh, and the man sat back in his chair.

"Agent Fawkes, it would be in your best interest to tell me what you found out from Mrs. Shepherd. I know you went to the agency her babysitter was hired from, and I know you talked to her housekeeper. I just need to know what you found out."

"I told you, I played with the dog, I didn't talk to Mrs. Shepherd. As to what I found out at the babysitting agency, did you know you need a warrant to get them to reveal information about their employees and clients? I didn't. So that's what I found out there."

"Agent Fawkes," the man said, speaking with patience that was clearly a bit threadbare, "You _really_ don't want to be playing games with me."

"Why not?" Darien asked innocently, "Do you cheat at scrabble?"

"This could get very ugly, Agent Fawkes," the man warned.

"Really? 'cause I'd say things are already ugly in here. Maybe you should try a different shade of paint, because this bleak shade of gray just screams suicidal depression."

The man glared at him. Darien stared back with his best guileless expression.

"One way or another, Agent Fawkes," the man assured him in menacing tones, "You will tell me what I want to know."

Though he did his best not to show it overtly, looking in the man's eyes, Darien believed him.

And that scared the hell out of him.


	12. Like Bells in the Distance

Sensing genuine threat to his continued well-being, Darien resolved the moment his questioner left to not wait for the guy to come back. Screw knowing who these people were, Darien wanted out!

During the interview, which had lasted some ten or fifteen minutes after the nameless man had assured him that things would get ugly if he continued to be uncooperative (which he absolutely did), Darien had quietly been at work on the ties at his wrists.

He'd learned long ago that most people haven't the faintest idea how to tie someone up so they can't get away, counting entirely on that someone to simply assume they can't. A surprising percentage of the world's population would accept that they couldn't get away as soon as they felt ties at their wrists. Maybe they'd tug a little, but if there wasn't immediate give, they'd accept that they were trapped.

But some clever poet back in the sixteenth century had pointed out that stone walls don't make a prison, nor iron bars a cage. There were a lot of interpretations of that, and it was generally considered most likely that the poet had been saying physical confinement and spiritual confinement were two different things. Darien chose to take it literally. Just because there were stone walls, it didn't mean they'd been put together in such a way as to make a prison, and iron bars in a pile couldn't cage anything, you had to put them in the right spots and weld them, if nothing else.

By the same token, just because someone had wrapped cord around Darien's wrists and tied it, that didn't mean he was hopelessly entangled. Very often, if you twisted around in the right way, you could find some concealed slack in such a tie, and thus find a way to slip free of it.

Even though Darien had discovered in the last half hour that he'd been respectably well tied, he nonetheless had found his bit of slack eventually, and was working at it. It had been noted by almost anyone who dealt with Darien for any length of time that he was actually very clever and highly resourceful, when properly motivated. In this case, he was quite motivated.

He hadn't at all liked the look in that man's eyes, and liked even less the tone of his voice.

The thing was, that guy had Darien more convinced than ever that these people -whoever they were- were exactly the sort of people who would have hidden cameras. That meant they'd know the second he made a move. So when he finally slipped the ties binding his hands, he had to figure out exactly what move he was going to make, commit to it, go fast and hope nobody anticipated it.

During his questioning, Darien had made a few guesses and taken a few stabs at goading his questioner into revealing just what sort of operation this was, who these people were and what interest they had in the Shepherds, but he hadn't met with any success, leaving him very much in the dark as to what sort of people his captors were. At this point, he'd pretty much decided ignorance was bliss as far as that was concerned, and had made escape his sole object of interest.

Since waking up here, Darien had only seen or heard one person, but four Santas had got him to begin with (not to mention the drivers of the two SUVs), so he had to believe the place was crawling with at least a half dozen big burly men who had probably shed their holiday outfits by now. Darien was neither big nor burly and he didn't really know how to fight except in the most amateurish way (normally a bit of a curse, but actually a small blessing whenever the Madness took hold; there was no telling how dangerous he might become if he went Mad and had learned martial arts or something).

It was a bit hard to make an escape plan without actually knowing anything of the building outside of this room, much less what might lie beyond the building itself, but Darien had no intention of staying here and seeing how ugly things could get. He'd just have to take his chances, trust to instinct, luck and the Gland to get him out. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done it, either.

Darien only wished that thought gave him more confidence than it did.

Trusting to instinct meant that his first move once he was freed was to lunge from his chair and dive over the desk in one move, get his shoulder under it and tip it over, sending the gargoyle-esque Santas crashing to the floor. Instinct said there were cameras in those Santas, even though he had no proof that there were any cameras anywhere. Still crouching behind the now toppled desk, Darien finally unleashed the Quicksilver Gland to do what it did best, namely render him invisible to the naked eye.

Silently, he slipped over to the wall with all the doors, and resisted the impulse to bolt. Security cameras or not, that crash would surely have been heard down the hall, and someone would be coming to investigate. Best to slip out when they came in to investigate rather than risk anyone chancing to see the door seemingly open by itself. People had been known to react in myriad ways when they saw the patently impossible, from fainting to shooting blindly at the impossibility as if some part of them sensed a human presence was behind it even though there was no visible evidence of it.

Darien had been shot before, and it wasn't something he fancied doing again. He'd found that being shot was monstrously unpleasant, and the treatment for bullet wounds wasn't much nicer.

Just as Darien had expected, both the door nearest the desk where his questioner had entered and another door at the other end of the room burst open within seconds in response to the noise. Two pairs of bewildered thug-types looked right through Darien at each other, then puzzledly entered the room, checking behind what little furniture as there was, closing unerringly in towards the desk, naturally assuming Darien was still behind it.

Darien didn't wait for them to figure out that he wasn't. He simply slipped out the nearer door and into a frustratingly featureless hallway. He looked up the hallway, and then down it, but neither direction promised anything except a series of doors and a sharp turn at the end that presumably led to another hallway. Darien hated buildings like this, because they didn't make any sense, and were carefully built to confuse you. It was as if the builders of these places had never been inside a building before, and had only heard the concept of rooms and hallways inexpertly explained to them.

And of course places like this always reeked of antiseptic and depression. Anyone who said depressing surroundings didn't have a particular smell had never been in one of these buildings before.

Selecting a direction at random, Darien jogged quietly down the hall and peered around the corner. A bank of frosted glass windows greeted him on the left, on the right were more doors, up ahead was more hallway. At the end though, there seemed to be a flight of stairs. That was promising anyway.

A shrill alarm went off suddenly, but that wasn't especially surprising. Hearing the goons thundering down the hall, Darien quickly ducked into the slight recess of a doorway and let them trundle past him.

If he'd known where he was going, he would have tried to outrun them, since alert guards at the exit would be a bit of an unwonted wrinkle, but he didn't really know where the exit was yet, so it seemed best to let the opposition do all the frantic running about and for him to stay out of their path so they didn't literally bump into him.

Still, he didn't waste time, primarily because he couldn't afford to stay invisible for long. As soon as the pair of goons had gone clumping down the stairs, Darien broke into a jog again. He did intend to go downstairs, since the light coming through the windows at his left suggested this was not a basement and that it was still daytime outside, but it seemed sensible to stop and listen at the head of the stairs, just in case the goons decided to come back upstairs.

Here at the stairs, he could see off to his right yet another extended hallway, at the end of which there appeared to be a recessed area, possibly for an elevator. But Darien didn't go to investigate. An elevator would be the stupidest place for him to go just now. Too easy to be caught -or shot- in a closed space like that, invisible or not. No, better to take the stairs and-

Darien's thoughts were interrupted by a sound coming from up the stairs, one that managed to cut even through the rather deafening alarm that still rang through the air. It was the sound of a young child, possibly even a baby, crying. It stopped Darien in his tracks, both physically and mentally. The sound of a crying child tends to have that effect on people anyway, they are practically programmed to respond to it (for good or ill) in some emotionally -and usually decisive- fashion. And of course, Darien had been assigned to find a baby-toddler. It seemed unlikely that the sound of a child's cry was coincidental. He felt a prickle of unease, as if he were being lured into a trap, the back of his imaginative mind pondered the possibility that someone was playing a recording of a baby's cry to get his attention. But that was too fantastic a possibility to be believed.

Selfish as Darien preferred to be, that pesky conscience he'd been endowed with started pecking at him, and he knew immediately that he would be going up stairs instead of down them, though he did put up a good fight in the form of three or four seconds of hesitation.

After that, however, Darien sprang into action. He went up the stairs as rapidly as quietness would allow, and found more featureless hallway and closed doors. But now he had something to use as a guide, specifically the sound of an increasingly unhappy (and thus increasingly loud) child.

Still operating on impulse more than thought, when Darien came to the closed door behind which he was convinced the child was crying, he tested the handle, found the door unlocked, and cautiously stood to one side when he pushed the door open. No shots greeted his intrusion, so he peered around the door and into the room, knowing anyone inside couldn't actually see him doing this.

There was some scattered office furniture, but the only thing Darien saw the moment he looked in was the little fair-haired boy with light eyes (he couldn't see color while quicksilvered, but he guessed blond and blue respectively, since this boy seemed to match the photo of Nicholas Shepherd). The boy was wearing a Christmas tree sweater (in this weather?), and had been stuck into a baby pen, which had a number of toys and a baby blanket. These had satisfied him until the alarm started blaring, at which time he became frightened,. as any sensible person of any age would be at such a god-awful sound.

Darien slipped through the door and closed it behind him, and then stopped to think. Obviously he couldn't just leave this child here, his conscience would not allow it. But he also couldn't get out with a crying toddler. Quicksilver made you invisible, not inaudible. Somehow, he had to quickly convince this probably pre-verbal child to shut up and come with him. Good luck with that.

Looking around quickly, he didn't see any sign that there was a monitor on this room. He wondered if one of the people who'd burst into the room where he'd started had been up here. Surely they hadn't left the kid all by himself for an extended period?

Not really sure what to do, Darien came forward and sat on the floor behind the playpen wall. He shook off the quicksilver and waited quietly until the startled child looked his way.

An adult would have been terrified by a man suddenly appearing within a few inches of them. Even an older child would likely have a fit. But at under a year old, Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd had a sense of wonder untainted by superstition or fear. He was frightened of the noise because it was painful to his ears, and louder than he could be. But it was not unusual for him to focus exclusively on something, and fail to notice if a parent or other relative entered until they talked to him and picked him up.

Of course, Nicky also had never been told not to talk to strange men, because so far he hadn't actually done enough talking to be told when not to talk. Like most children his age, Nicky was constantly being introduced to what he considered to be random strangers his parents had seemingly just picked up off the street and brought in to see him. He didn't know aunts, uncles, cousins, babysitters, family friends or doctors, and couldn't tell one stranger from another.

He could only formulate opinions based on minor, some would say peculiar, details. For instance, he didn't like men with very large beards. It concerned him that he couldn't see what their chins were doing. He didn't like women with bright lipstick, it had a funny smell. He didn't like it when people wore toques which hid their ears, because it looked like they didn't have any, and for some reason young Nicky found that particularly upsetting. He didn't like the men who had brought him here, because none of them ever smiled, and he had learned already that a smile is a friendly expression. They also towered over him in bulky clothes, and he couldn't see what their bodies were doing under all that black, and he didn't like that at all.

But this new person wasn't towering. He was just sitting on the floor, like Nicky's parents and babysitter did when they played with him. He had no beard and, though his hair was pretty wild, Nicky could see his ears weren't doing anything suspicious. In fact, this new stranger didn't have any of the things Nicky found scary about other people. Most importantly, however, this stranger smiled.

"Hi," the stranger said, as quietly as the all-consuming alarm sound would let him, "I'm Darien."

Nicky looked at him somewhat warily. At least he wasn't doing that goo-goo babytalk thing some other strangers did, which made Nicky suspect he was being mocked for his inability to talk like adults. But he was using words strange to Nicky, which made him feel a little excluded from this conversation. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and peered over his hand at Darien.

"Well," Darien muttered aloud, "At least you're not screaming anymore. That's something."

Nicky simply stared at him, uncomprehending.

"Why do I get the feeling that if I picked you up now, you'd try to bite me?" Darien asked, but of course he received no answer for this, so he sighed, "This might take some doing."


	13. Find the Wonder of a Child

Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd looked passingly similar to his adoptive mother, but the depth and clarity in his blue eyes was much more outstanding than the eyes of Rosemary Shepherd. There was an entire galaxy of blue in his wide eyes, ranging from their almost electric blue base color, to the teal-shaded iris rim, to the flecks of indigo throughout, and there wasn't a hint of any other color in them besides shades of blue, not even gray.

These incredibly complex eyes watched dispassionately as Darien struggled to find some way to endear himself to this young boy, enough that he might get out of the building with Nicky. He had to convince the boy to be quiet, and to accept being quicksilvered, and he had exactly no time to do it in. The trouble was, Darien wasn't really sure how to accomplish that. He actually had quite a natural way with children, but so little experience with them that he didn't entirely trust it.

Of course, talking hadn't done very much good so far. Darien hadn't hit on any words Nicky understood, or at least none that he seemed to care very much about.

Finally Darien took a look at the room and asked himself an important question: If he were a baby who'd just figured out sitting up, crawling around and even walking a little bit, and had been shut up in a pen, what would interest him the most? The answer, to anyone who's ever been behind bars against his will, was obvious. Once Darien hit on it, he knew more by gut instinct than anything that it was right, it was good, and he'd have Nicky on his side in a matter of seconds.

Not only that, but he'd warm Nicky to the idea of quicksilver at the same time.

"Okay, I can see you're too sophisticated for funny faces," Darien said, "But how about some _really_ good sleight of hand?" carefully, so as not to startle the child with sudden movement, Darien reached out to the playpen and delicately laid a few fingers on it.

With the precision control he'd learned all those months ago when Kevin was still alive, Darien carefully ran the quicksilver up and down the playpen, one dramatic bar at a time, making sure he went slow enough for Nicky's eyes to track his progress. He also wanted to make sure he wasn't just scaring the boy, since that would be counterproductive. But Nicky seemed enraptured by the performance, watching steadily and giving a couple of delighted coos at appropriate moments.

At the end, with a flourish that swept the invisible section of play pen aside, Darien gestured an invitation to Nicky to join him in his freedom outside the playpen.

Darien understood better than perhaps anyone else alive that a prison was a prison, no matter how many neat toys were in it, or how invisible the walls were. Darien had been in an iron bar prison, in a science lab prison, in a soft-walled prison for loonies, and presently existed in an invisible prison bounded on all sides by government cronies, counter-agent and Madness.

He'd learned that it didn't matter what you called it, a cage was still a cage.

It seemed like Nicky agreed with him, for the child clapped his hands at the end of the performance, then reached out to touch where the play pen wall had been, drew back with real surprise and clapped again, gurgling pleasantly as he did so. The thing that really amazed Darien was that a kid under a year old was more ready to accept the reality of invisibility than any adult.

"You think that's neat?" Darien said with a grin, "Wait 'til you see my next trick."

Darien's next trick was actually one of the first he'd learned, which was to make only one portion of himself invisible, beginning on one hand and running that up his arm, across his back and down the other arm, all the time making sure the few inches of invisibility didn't get any bigger or smaller as it traveled from one side to the other. The effect was a little like a mouse running over his hand, only the mouse made his hand invisible. Nicky showed genuine interest in this "mouse" trick, and eagerly waved a hand to indicate he wanted to touch the part of Darien he couldn't see.

For some reason, even though Nicky didn't like clothing or facial hair that hid what a body was doing, quicksilver didn't scare him. The idea of just not seeing something at all was somehow less distressing to his mind than the idea of something being concealed or hidden behind something else. The peculiar logic of children has been the subject of many studies and extensive discussions, but no adult is quite agreed as to how children really think and of course children don't find the question relevant.

Obligingly, Darien reached out his invisible left hand until it met the child's questing fingers, and he let Nicky explore this fascinating new element in his reality. Despite circumstance, Darien found himself grinning at the child's wonder at discovery, and a part of him wanted to just go on playing with the boy in this room for the rest of the day, rather than make their joint escape.

"If you think that's cool, you should see my street performances," Darien remarked, even though he knew by now that Nicky had next to no idea what he was saying.

Slowly, cautiously, Darien urged the quicksilver to spread from him to Nicky. He expected the child to draw back, startled or even frightened as he lost sight of his hand, but that didn't happen. Nicky froze, watching for a lengthy number of seconds as his fingers, then his hand, then his wrist, then more and more of his arm disappeared. Then he broke into a broad smile and giggled.

Darien shook his head in quiet surprise, "Didn't see that coming, but I'll take it. Okay, Nicky, here comes the big finish."

Incremental control on quicksilver was enormously taxing, and also tended to get the Madness stirred up quicker. Darien always thought that was because he was distracted, and the Madness found a way in while he wasn't looking. In any case, the moment he was certain Nicky was going to be okay with this, he let it go, rapidly coating the both of them head to toe with quicksilver.

At that point, Nicky stopped giggling. The visual change for him was more shocking than going invisible in the first place. The world of glowing white, sparkling silver, smoke gray and hard line black was startling to him, as it was startling to anyone accustomed to seeing in color. The sharpening of some details and softening of others was equally disorienting. Most noticeably for Darien was how people changed, he couldn't usually recognize someone later if he saw them while quicksilvered, despite his eye for detail. Claire said he saw in infrared, but if that was the case it sure didn't look anything like those cameras that saw in infrared.

Seeing in quicksilver was something else, something nobody really had a name for. Darien could sense that as well as see it. It was more than just grayscale or infrared, it was a way of seeing that was terrible and terrifying, yet equally wonderful and unique. Darien loved it as much as he hated it.

The real question now was, how was Nicky going to feel about it?

Stiffly, Darien prepared for what he now expected would be the inevitable wail of terror that must surely come from the child once he took in how strange the world suddenly looked. Any second, Nicky would come to the horrible realization that the world as he knew it had been turned on its head, and he would reel back in terror, ruining the one chance Darien had of getting out of here with him quietly.

It did not so much as occur to Darien to put a sock in the child's mouth or bonk him on the head to knock him out until such time as they were away from the danger, though he was more than willing to do either or even both to an unwilling adult he was obligated for some reason to tow along with him. Perhaps chivalry was indeed dead, but one of its less popular relatives was alive and well, and forbade Darien from even considering laying violent or otherwise inappropriate hand on a child.

What was more, it awakened in him the fierce protective instinct of the guardian, though he otherwise lacked most of the qualities that would lead people to consider him a good parent. He might have escaped and come back for Nicky later, but such a course would mean leaving the child in this less than desirable situation, and Darien couldn't bring himself to face that. Rather, he would prefer to risk his own recapture -complete with the awareness that things were likely to 'get ugly' if he were caught- than to leave the boy alone. On the one occasion that Darien had sustained an actual bullet wound, it had been while he was protecting a child, and he had been -inexplicably, even to himself- drawn like a moth to flame right back to that child's side, to repeatedly invite further bullets to become acquainted with his various vital organs. Darien would prefer to endure perpetual Quicksilver Madness than to allow even one child to be even slightly harmed or even terribly frightened in his presence.

To his surprise, Nicky seemed quite delighted by this new view of the world, almost as if everything had been strange and alien to him but now suddenly it was clear. Unfortunately, he not only giggled, but began to actively "babble," issuing forth high-pitched squeals, coos, partial words and various unattached consonants. It was nice to hear, if you liked baby noises, and especially if you'd been expecting fear and horror, but not so good if you're objective was to get out of a building in silence.

It was at this point that Darien's escape plan started to fall apart. Having found no sign of the escaped Darien, the goons were sweeping the building, checking rooms and closets, sure that Darien hadn't gotten out of the building but not sure where he'd actually gone. Soon enough, one of them came to the door of the room where Nicky was being held.

Darien had only the time it takes to turn a knob to react. He'd been so intent on Nicky that he had not heard the sound of approaching footsteps, so the first he knew of the invasion was the click of the latch.

At once, Darien leaped back, away from Nicky. Quicksilver tumbled from the child's skin, hair and sweater like shedding frost. By the time the door opened, Nicky was visible, and also shrieking in either fear or anger at this unwonted reversion to color and normal light. The goon immediately saw that Nicky was no longer secured in his playpen, but assumed the child must have somehow knocked the fence open. He moved into the room to secure the child, after a brief visual sweep showed no sign of anyone else being there. Darien pounced on him at once, but his choke hold was inept at best and it wasn't as easy to one punch people into unconsciousness as the movies made it seem.

For several seconds, Darien grappled with his foe from behind, giving the man plenty of time to stagger about and yell awkwardly for help. The physical confrontations were usually Hobbes' thing. Darien did sneaking, and anything which involved a great deal of running or dexterity, but Hobbes was the martial arts expert, who could drop a hooligan of any size and disposition in a matter of moments. Darien's stealth depended on his never being discovered, but Hobbes could silence a foe in the first instant of a confrontation with some sort of jab in the direction of their throat.

Riding the back of what suddenly seemed to Darien to be a behemoth rather than a man, hanging on desperately to his shoulders and neck, Darien got a good taste of what it was like to ride a bucking bronco, only usually there wasn't a handy wall or collection of furniture for the rider to be bashed into as the bronco heaved itself about the arena.

At one point, Darien was slammed against the frame of the door through which this thug had come, and his quicksilver vision snapped and flashed less with stars and more with jagged lightning flashes that were echoed by the pain that lanced through his body as a result of the impact.

But, eventually, Darien's advantage of surprise and his dogged tenacity resulted in success, and the behemoth slowly sank to the industrially carpeted floor. Gasping for breath of his own, Darien collapsed on top of the unconscious figure, still clinging to his own invisibility.

Nicky had waxed silent, and gazed wonderingly at the display put on for him, not comprehending in the slightest the violence he'd just been witness to; sure that it must have been one of those things adults did that was meant to entertain him. Adults liked to make all sorts of goofy faces, and flail about in most unusual ways, all to see if they couldn't get Nicky to laugh at them. To him, this had been a rather lackluster performance, and not worth even a smile, much less a chuckle.

Then he felt Darien's hand on his arm, and delighted in the sudden quicksilvering of the world. For whatever reason, he remained silent this time, possibly suspecting that this delightful condition had been taken away as a result of the noise he'd made earlier. Darien sighed in relief.

Maybe they had a shot at getting out of here after all.

Trying to ignore the complaints from his rapidly bruising body, Darien went to the open door, then ducked aside as several men came to investigate the commotion they'd overheard. To his relief, Nicky stayed utterly silent as the men rushed in, examined their unconscious comrade and then began to babble excitedly to one another, demanding to know where the kid was and concluding that Agent Fawkes must surely have him, as that was the only logical explanation, though of course they could not fathom how he had managed to get out of this room unnoticed.

Darien left them to their panicky dialogue, slipping back the way he'd come, taking the stairs as smoothly as possible so as not to jostle the still silent Nicky. Without pausing, he took the second flight of stairs down to what he hoped was the ground floor and began looking around for a likely exit.

Seeing a double door blocked by two men who looked like they were auditioning to become bouncers, Darien suspected quite strongly that he'd found it. The trouble was, what to do now?

Somehow, he had to get the men off the door in order to go through it. But if he continued to carry Nicky, the boy might be hurt in the altercation. If he put Nicky down, that would not only instantly reveal the child to them, but would also set them to speculating about invisibility, and probably lead the youngster to start screaming again, which would bring that unholy horde of violently-inclined humanity upstairs right down on Darien's head, which was still spinning from the last time that had happened. It seemed unlikely that he was going to get out of here without sustaining further injury.

 _Ah crap._


	14. Walk Down the Street

Darien knew he was going to have to move fast, regardless of what he did.

Not really sure it was the right idea, but knowing he had to do something, Darien moved away from the exit doors, going down the hall until he found an alcove that was out of sight of the doors. It was here that he set Nicky down and quickly stepped back, expecting the child to cry as he had last time the quicksilver vision was taken away from him, and hopefully draw the notice of the door guards enough that they would leave their post and come over here, at which point Darien would try to knock them out, one right after the other, ideally before they yelled out an alarm or anything.

Granted, the screaming toddler might bring goons down to investigate without the security guards raising any alarms of their own, but Darien had to take that chance because he couldn't think of anything better in the few seconds he had to formulate a plan.

But a piece of his plan failed right at the start. He had cried and screamed before when the quicksilver fell from him, but this time Nicky had nothing to say about it. He just sat there on the linoleum flooring, looking up at where he knew Darien to be and sucking his thumb.

Fortunately, that really wasn't much of a problem. Darien had simply assumed screaming would follow when he put the child down. Since he was invisible, Darien could take the two guards by surprise whether they were over here or over there. They literally wouldn't see him coming.

Realizing that he had to just trust that Nicky would stay quiet for a few moments, Darien turned and went at the guards at a run. Darien smacked bodily into one, hitting the larger man's chest with his shoulder, knocking him back against the door and at the same time driving the wind out of him.

In almost the same maneuver, Darien redirected and took a whack at the other guard, using his elbow rather than his fist. Experience told him that punching was a miserable activity, hands were actually pretty fragile and not meant for smacking things. Darien was tall enough to pull off the action even though he didn't really know how to deliver a blow most effectively, and was basically going on pure guesswork and visual memory of having seen Hobbes pull off the move.

Without taking the time to see if this opponent went all the way down, Darien turned on the other and tried to repeat what he'd just done. But this guy was taller, and at a weird angle as he was pushing off the door, and Darien's elbow really just knocked his chin a bit. So Darien followed through with a punch, which really hurt, but seemed to get the job done.

Shaking his hand in a futile attempt to take the sting out of it, Darien looked over his handiwork. Both goons were down, neither had been given the opportunity to shout, and the baby hadn't even cried.

Returning to where the child was waiting, Darien said, "Well, Nicky, I guess you don't want to be here any more than I do, huh?" he then picked Nicky up, and coated him in quicksilver, musing, "I wonder what a doctor would think of my quicksilvering a toddler."

It had never come up whether quicksilver was safe for babies or not, and it hadn't even occurred to Darien to wonder until now. All he really knew about small children was that they were really fragile. Though it really didn't change what he was doing since that had been the plan already, he resolved to get out of the situation where he had to quicksilver Nicky as rapidly as possible.

Quietly, Darien returned to the two guards he'd dropped and carefully stepped over them to open one of the double doors to the outside world. If Nicky had any thoughts on the bodies in the hall, he didn't express them except to keep sucking his thumb and silently looking at everything as if he were a tourist in a museum full of particularly interesting artwork.

Outside, Darien was relieved to see that at least he hadn't been carted off to the middle of nowhere, though where he actually was now he had little idea. Even though Darien was certain it was the same day that he'd been kidnapped, it was notably cooler here than where he'd started. But that was a peculiar feature of California, you didn't really have to take a long drive to find almost completely different weather, depending on where you'd started and which direction you drove in.

Looking around, it seemed like he was at the outer edge of a warehouse district, and all of those looked pretty much the same to him. Big, ugly buildings, not a lot of pedestrians, only a high traffic area at certain times of the day, and only if the district had been built between two highly interesting points, such as major cities or tourist attractions of some sort. There wasn't a lot of traffic here, but Darien was distressed to see that most of it consisted of black SUVs just like the two that had chased and cornered him. Black SUVs weren't exactly unusual, but Darien had to go on the assumption that any such vehicle he saw was out looking for him.

That of course meant Darien had to maintain his quicksilver coating. And that would become increasingly dangerous. Quicksilver oozed into his system whether he used the Gland or not, but when he went invisible his bloodstream was all but flooded with the stuff. It drastically cut down the amount of time he had before he needed his next fix of counter-agent. Not knowing where he was, or when he would be able to contact The Agency, Darien understandably wanted to lay off the invisibility as soon as possible. But there wasn't any convenient hotel to duck into out here, or even a back alley. Surrounded by fencing, the warehouse plots made it impossible to travel efficiently anywhere except alongside the main road through the place, which was of course in plain view of all the black SUVs out there. And Darien wasn't stupid enough to just go blundering off away from signs of civilization.

He needed to find out where he was, and he also needed to find a phone so he could call The Agency and let them know firstly that he'd been kidnapped, secondly that he'd escaped, and thirdly that he needed a ride home. But there weren't a lot of phones out here. And he didn't have his wallet anyway, he belatedly realized. Not that getting hold of enough cash to use a pay phone would be a problem for him, but that also meant he didn't have his ID, and getting that replaced wasn't so easy as picking up quarters. Although it was a lot easier with The Agency on his side. IDs, real and fake, were not something The Agency had trouble generating.

But the only thing for it here and now was to just start walking. There really wasn't anything else Darien could do except look up and down the main street, pick the direction that looked like it led into a more inhabited area, and go that way.

It was a long walk for someone who'd recently been overdosed with anesthetic, especially considering the violent altercations Darien had since participated in and the fact that he was carrying twenty odd pounds of extra weight that wasn't necessarily even as easy to carry as a sack of potatoes because sometimes Nicky was leaning into him, and other times Nicky would suddenly and without warning lean away, as if he was reaching out to try and grab a vehicle as it flashed past. Nicky also had a distinct preference for being carried on the right side, and would start flopping around if Darien shifted him to the left to give his right arm a break. The maintaining of invisibility wasn't particularly taxing physically, and the concentration needed to hold it wasn't excessive, but the awareness that each passing second brought him closer to the edge of Madness was extremely wearing mentally.

There was also the small matter of the setting sun and surprisingly precipitous temperature drop that seemed to be coming with it. That was a signature of desert areas, temperatures could skyrocket around midday, but plummet with the coming of nightfall. Darien didn't really want to be stuck out here after dark, for a number of reasons. Mostly, however, Darien hated being isolated.

Gregarious by nature, Darien already suffered a lack of social activity since the implantation of the Gland, he just couldn't hang around his old friends much, and certainly hadn't been able to attend any fun parties. But he compensated by engaging in a variety of activities that invariably got The Agency up in arms. His favorite being of course trying to "run away," even though there was patently nowhere for him to run to and everyone knew it, so it was completely silly the way The Agency went nuts every time he dropped off their radar for so much as five seconds. The Agency was a micromanaging and paranoid organization, always wanting to know exactly what every single one of its employees was doing at every single moment of every day.

Normally Darien detested The Agency's habit of spying on him (and of course he resented being reined in), and he pretty routinely went through all his things these days to check for and remove bugs. Darien couldn't have freedom, but he could have the illusion of it by having a modicum of privacy. What Darien wouldn't give for one of those bugging devices hidden in his shoe right now.

Eventually, the black SUVs started to thin out, and the main street split off in various directions towards shopping centers and parking lots. Not a high class area, but at least Darien could be somewhere other than exactly where the black SUVs would expect him to be. Finally, he could drop the quicksilver. Nicky must have gotten bored of it, because he really didn't seem to mind the loss.

Darien checked the serpent on his wrist. It was much closer to the red than he would have liked, but the Madness hadn't yet begun to knock at the door of his sanity. He was doing alright. For the moment. But everything here seemed to be shut down and closed for the holidays. It wasn't surprising this close to Christmas, especially in areas like this one, with these kinds of shops. Probably they didn't get enough customers to justify staying open. In any case, there was no opportunity for Darien to go in anywhere and ask if he could use their phone, and he still hadn't seen a single pay phone anywhere.

He did the only thing he could. He kept going.

Sunset came early at this time of year, making it feel like the middle of the night for hours before anyone normal even thought about going to bed. Once the dark started to settle in, Darien found himself frequently checking his watch for the time, feeling all the time like it was later than it was.

The dark meant he wouldn't be as easy to spot from the road, but for some reason he didn't find the thought comforting. As if it were distant kin to the werewolf, the Gland seemed to be most active at night. Madness lurked closer to the surface. And it never seemed nearer than when Darien was alone. And he was certainly alone out here, totally isolated from everything and everyone familiar.

A chill crept into the air, not as cold as he imagined, but cooler than was comfortable nonetheless.

Nicky began to fuss intermittently, probably more because he was hungry than because he was cold. Unlike Darien, Nicky had a sweater on. But they'd been out here a long time. Darien didn't know when Nicky had been fed last, or how often you needed to feed kids this age, or even _what_ to feed them. Not that it would have mattered, Darien had no food to offer Nicky.

Tired, focused on avoiding trouble and looking for a phone, Darien didn't have the energy to spare to jolly the toddler along, barely speaking at all to Nicky as he went. Feeling ignored might have contributed to the child's fussiness, but Darien could do nothing about that either.

A feeling of cold helplessness grew as minutes passed and the surroundings grew darker and seemingly more desolate. It began to dawn on Darien that, sweater or not, it might get too cold out for Nicky. He needed to find somewhere to go. More than contacting The Agency, he needed somewhere warm to put Nicky, somewhere with food (whatever food children transitioning from baby to toddler ate).

But there didn't seem to be anywhere for them to go, and all the time it was getting darker and colder.

Then, quite suddenly, the night was bathed in light. Darien had just turned onto a street lined with condos to avoid a black SUV prowling down the main street of the town. The street had been utterly dark, but all at once it was lit up on all sides by a plethora of Christmas lights. The people of these condos had gotten together to set all their lights on the same timer. They had wrapped the railings of the steps to their doors in lights, and the few bushes in front of their homes. Many had framed their first and even second floor windows in lights as well. A few especially committed souls had light up wreaths on their doors, and snowflakes or Christmas stars in their windows.

The whole street was decked out in primarily white and blue lights, with only a few tasteful exceptions on railings and wreaths being multicolored. Trees out in the parking lots were likewise colored. Because there really wasn't any space for such arrangements, nobody had put out Santas or reindeer or gaudy nativity setups. Just lights.

Lights which Darien had never welcomed as he did now. Not only did they light his path, they made the night feel warmer. More importantly, they got Nicky to stop fussing, as he became enthralled with this fascinating new look to the world. But perhaps most important of all, they made Darien fell less alone, less isolated. Though he knew it wasn't so, it felt almost like the lights had been turned on just for him. They shone with welcome, and he felt suddenly sure that someone in one of these condos would surely let him use their phone, even if nothing else.

All he had to do was go door to door. In a neighborhood like this, surely nobody would ignore him even if they thought he was a caroler. He didn't even feel like the usual drawback of being an athletic young man (which pegged him as a potentially dangerous individual) would apply here. Especially not since he was carrying a baby wearing a Christmas sweater.

"What's say we knock on some doors, huh, Nicky?"


	15. Peace to the Weary Ones

For awhile, it seemed like Darien's new found hopes were to be dashed, as he went from one door to the next and nobody came. He couldn't tell if they weren't home, or were merely too busy watching _It's a Wonderful Life_ on TV to come to the door. Darien supposed people fanatical enough about Christmas decorations to all get together and make a unified display probably went out caroling or something.

"You know, I could just break in," Darien told Nicky, after yet another doorbell had been rung in vain, "It's not like I'm too reformed for that. Besides I haven't got a thick enough jacket for this weather."

All of that was true, and the reason Darien didn't do that had less to do with morality and more to do with the fact that he couldn't be sure a condo was empty and that no one was home, couldn't know when they'd be back, couldn't know if there might be an unexpected electronic alarm system or lurking dog just waiting to bark the alarm (Darien had learned the hard way that not all dogs got up and barked just because they heard a doorbell, and those self-contained animals generally did a lot more than bark if anyone broke into their house; something Darien had _also_ learned the hard way).

Getting tired and discouraged, Darien decided to sit on the steps in front of a condo for a bit, and try to think of something better to do than this, which seemed to be a losing strategy. Before he could get really into the self-pity, a disturbance in the condo right next to the one he'd just rung the doorbell of came to his attention. In fact, the disturbance nearly had him lunging across the street and quicksilvering in sudden panic, because it was very sudden, very loud, and right behind him.

Either hearing the neighboring doorbell, or smelling a stranger, a dog had come to investigate. For a number of seconds, the animal stood noiselessly behind its own door, then moved over to the small window next to the door, and plastered its black nose to the glass. It stood thus for a few moments, panting and spitting drool onto the window soundlessly. Then, quite suddenly, the dog decided that this needed to be barked at, and let loose a volley of thunderous roars fit to rattle windows and shake foundations. All unaware of the dog until that moment, Darien jumped to his feet and whirled around, then sighed in shaky relief as he saw the dog was trapped indoors.

Still, it was a massive thing, shaggy and all white, and looking more like a prize Merino sheep than a dog. With each tremendous bark, the dog sprayed fresh spittle onto the glass.

Nicky began to cry again, and Darien was about to move on when the dog's owner appeared. The hope of finally getting somewhere warm, and being able to call The Agency was enough to hold Darien indecisive for the moments it took the owner to hush the dog and open the door.

"Can I help you?" encased in a thick sweater, and with curled white hair piled on her head, the little old lady looked even more like a sheep than her dog, but Darien resisted the impulse to say so.

Quickly overcoming his surprise at this latest turn of events, Darien engaged one of his most ingratiating smiles and answered, "I was just looking for a phone I could use. I'm supposed to be meeting some friends of mine, but I got lost and so I'd really like to call them so they can come get me," he decided not to ask what town he was in.

"Well that would explain why you're out walking after dark with a baby," the woman observed dryly, and seemed to look him up and down suspiciously.

Darien was uncomfortably aware that he couldn't pass himself off as the father type, and of course the distinctly bright blue and blond baby looked nothing at all like him. Adopted children weren't that strange, but people tended to take one look at anyone carrying a baby that didn't look like them and wonder if the child had been stolen, especially since it was more common for children to inherit darker hair, skin and eyes from their parents, so even a blond and blue-eyed mother explanation would seem suspect (though such an occurrence was more than possible, Darien didn't think he could win an argument about it, especially not here and now).

Finally, the woman sighed, "I suppose you should come in. Haven't got a cordless phone," she turned and shuffled off into her house, calling after herself, "Don't mind the dog, she's friendly."

Darien had his doubts about that, and he wasn't sure he really wanted a dog the size of a pony to be too friendly. Fortunately, the dog seemed more aloof than friendly, and maintained her distance after forcing Darien to edge around her to get inside the condo. Silently, she brought up the rear of the procession as Darien followed the little old lady into an economically sized kitchen.

The tiny condo seemed an incongruous place to have a large dog, all the more so because this little old lady was apparently a Christmas tree fanatic and had one in every available corner. Each tree had its own color of lights and theme of ornaments, all of which looked breakable and easy to knock off their branches. Yet the dog managed to disturb nothing, and lay down on the tile floor in the kitchen, continuing to eye Darien with apparent distrust.

Almost superstitiously, Darien wondered if the big dog knew he had just earlier today been bitten by another of its kind, and trusted the instinct of its brethren.

More likely, the dog could tell that he was nervous in her presence, for the aforementioned reason, in fact. It is not easy to get over a dog bite so quickly, and this dog was easily twice the size of the pup that had taken teeth to him earlier that day, and more fearsome by default simply by being a mature animal that would no doubt be more effective in action should she decide to take it.

"Sorry I took so long to get up," the woman was saying, "I don't move like I used to. Besides, the doorbell on this place has been busted for six months. Essie does her best as substitute."

Darien, a little slow after the day's events, asked, "Essie?"

"Esther," the woman clarified, then gestured, "The dog. It's a Hebrew name. Means 'star,' I think."

"Ah," was all Darien could think of to say to that, to which he added, "Well, I'm Darien, and this is Nicky," he bounced Nicky -who had gone quiet again- a little bit.

"Gabrielle," the woman introduced herself, "Pretentious, isn't it? What kind of name is Gabrielle for a little old lady living by herself in a condominium with her dog?"

Darien sensed that to answer what he really thought was a trap, so he simply said, "Your name?"

Gabrielle brightened and chuckled, "Ah, that must be it!"

In Darien's rapidly growing list of experiences was included a short time as a member of the elderly community. It had given him a milder perspective on the aged and confused, very different from just weeks prior to his third conviction, when he had felt little but impatience with senior citizens (and covetous of their life savings). Even then, his conscience had prevented him from outright cruelty, but a little personal experience had softened his attitude and increased his patience. He had also come to understand a thing or two about loneliness.

So even though he had many seemingly more important things on his mind just now, Darien felt his heart go out to this lonely little wool-clad woman. He didn't know what he could possibly do for her, but he felt that he wanted to do something. But first he had to make a call.

Gabrielle indicated the old-fashioned yellow rotary phone attached to the wall, and then she politely departed for the living room. Esther the dog remained lying where she was, watching Darien's every move. Darien tried not to look at her while he struggled to one-hand the phone. He was still holding Nicky, not daring to put the boy down lest something happen to separate them.

The phone rang. And it rang. And it rang. And... gradually Darien got the impression nobody was there. Even if Hobbes had been at The Agency, he wouldn't have answered, but Eberts wasn't a field agent so surely he should be there. The Official would probably die of shame before he'd answer his own phone (that was one of the things Eberts was for). Claire of course had a separate line in the lab. But when Darien tried her number, she didn't answer either. And neither of The Agency numbers he knew had answering machines; The Official deemed them too expensive and unnecessary, "That's why we have Eberts," he had said in so many words on more than one occasion.

Darien tried to remember if he even knew anyone's home phone number. Not that he expected anyone to be home, but this was a wrinkle he hadn't anticipated.

"Well now what, Nicky?" Darien asked, though he didn't genuinely expect an answer.

He didn't realize until now that this phone call was what he'd been pinning everything on. Not only did he not have an ID, he didn't even have his wallet or anything in it. Aside from engaging in criminal activities, he had no way of getting home on his own. He was tired, he was hungry, he was hurting, and he couldn't think of a story he could sell to Gabrielle as to why he had been unable to contact people supposedly expecting him, much less why he didn't know what to feed his supposed son.

The dog had laid her head on the floor while he used the phone, but now she lifted it to regard him coldly out of very dark, intelligent looking eyes. Darien didn't like the knowing look of the dog.

"What? It's not like I chose to be here," Darien told the dog, who twitched one folded ear.

Slow dread crept through him as he flashed back to the crime that had started him down this road as the Invisible Man. He remembered only too well how much trouble the victim's being elderly had put him in. Not that he meant Gabrielle any harm, but the mere thought of dishonesty with regards to her left him feeling slightly ill, not so much out of morality as a desire to avoid prison. Moreover, if Darien was arrested, they'd take Nicky away, and the kidnappers might get their hands on the boy again.

Darien knew he was thinking in circles, his usually quick wits were sluggish and confused by exhaustion and drug side effects. The steady, almost accusing glare of the sheepish dog wasn't helping.

Apparently Gabrielle got the sense that Darien had gotten off the phone, because she strolled back into the kitchen. Her pale blue eyes looked at Darien and Nicky appraisingly.

"I couldn't get an answer," Darien said flatly, unable to think of any explanation for why that was, and not even sure if shading the truth would be a good idea anyway, since in this case the truth was simply that no one had answered and he didn't know why, and maybe that wasn't a suspicious thing to say.

Gabrielle simply nodded, "Well, I was about to make some soup. Maybe you'd like to join me for dinner. You can try to call your friends again later. Your boy like potato soup?"

"I... uh... I've never made it for him," Darien answered honestly.

Politely, Gabrielle did not ask about the boy's mother. Single-parenting for one reason or another was not an uncommon occurrence, and possibly she assumed that Darien's neglecting to mention a second parent was not accidental. In any case, she merely nodded decisively.

"Well, we'll see what he thinks of it, shall we?" Darien wasn't entirely sure that was a question.

Darien had no idea if you fed potato soup to toddlers or not, but he couldn't think of a reason to object that would not make it obvious that this was not his child. Still considering that question, Darien suddenly realized he was in the way of the woman, who was now wielding a small pot. He stepped back, away from the stove.

"Maybe you should take a seat," Gabrielle suggested, "Unless you want to help. You can set the little one next to Essie then, she'll keep him away from any cords or outlets. She's very good with children."

Having already doubted Gabrielle's assertion that the dog was friendly, Darien was doubly unsure about her confidence in the dog's babysitting skills. But he felt he needed to make an excuse.

"I'm a bit of a disaster in the kitchen," Darien said cautiously.

"Most men are," Gabrielle replied.

Darien felt that wasn't really true, but he couldn't exactly use himself as an example, especially right now. And he didn't really feel that he wanted to argue with this woman anyway. So far she'd taken him at face value, and very kind, not just in inviting him in, but by not asking prickly questions. In fact, she acted a bit like she found strange men carrying babies at her door all the time.

So Darien took a seat at the dining room table, which was in the same room as the kitchen. Facing the stove where Gabrielle was working, Darien found a sliding glass back door to his left, and a little alcove for laundry to his right. Esther the dog took up nearly all the floor space not occupied by the small dining table and its chairs, leaving just enough space for someone to work in around the fridge, counter and stove of the kitchenette.

Gabrielle hummed little Christmas songs to herself, and intermittently asked Darien questions, none of which were personal enough to make him falter. She asked him where he was from, but he had no trouble replying that though he lived in California, he wasn't from this area. She didn't ask him what he did for a living, though she did ask about his plans for Christmas. Deftly he replied that he was supposed to spend it at his friend's place, and that it would be effectively Nicky's first Christmas.

"Sometimes friends are more like family than family is, especially around holidays like Christmas," Gabrielle remarked.

"Yeah," Darien agreed, though he did not add that he really didn't have much family left, or that he really wasn't much for Christmas anyway.

In fact, he waxed silent for awhile as he was not only feeling fatigue, but also the first prickling knock of Madness at the back of his brain. It was a long way off, but it was coming.


	16. With Heart and Soul and Voice

The soup was good. Primarily it consisted of potatoes, but Darien had never encountered potatoes prepared quite so delicately. Somehow Gabrielle had made potato soup that almost -but not quite- had the consistency of mashed potatoes, but was just slightly more liquid. Milk made most of the broth, little, infinitesimal bits of carrot and celery offered up a surprising bit of color. Otherwise, the seasonings were simple and mild. Whatever Nicky's usual food preferences, he was hungry enough that he might have found a chair leg good to eat, so he did not reject this presumably strange fare.

It was a good thing too, because Darien didn't have any innate child feeding ability, and he'd never had to practice it as a skill. Nicky's cooperation was the only way he was ever going to get any food into the toddler-baby. Darien also figured that when Nicky started rejecting it, that would be his cue that the toddler was full.

The three of them ate mostly without speaking. Apparently used to being alone, it didn't come to Gabrielle how to maintain talk at the table. Darien was preoccupied with trying to make the tricky mechanics of child feeding look natural and well-practiced when it patently wasn't.

After that, Darien tried to call The Agency again, while Gabrielle cleaned up the dishes and put away leftovers. She then got out a zipped bag of what looked like shredded meat, which she dumped into her empty soup bowl and put in the microwave for a few seconds. She stirred this around, then went under the cabinet for a dog bowl. She scooped some kibble into it, then poured the contents of the soup bowl into it and stirred the two together. This in turn she set on the floor.

Esther the dog, who had not moved at any point during the preparation, consumption and cleaning up of the soup, heaved herself to her feet and slowly padded over to her dish. She sniffed at it, and took a few surprisingly dainty bites, lifting her head to crunch each kibble with evident relish before dipping down again for another dignified -if noisy- mouthful.

Darien shook his head, "I don't get it."

"Still not answering?" Gabrielle inquired, continuing to watch her pet eat.

"No," Darien answered, unable to imagine where everyone had gone.

It was actually beginning to worry him a little. Normally the people at The Agency were pretty on the ball when it came to the phones, possibly because of the lack of an answering machine. And it certainly wasn't a nine-to-five operation, so it wasn't like they'd shut down for the night.

Almost without doubt, Hobbes was out hunting for Darien. Probably everyone assumed Darien had taken off of his own accord again. But what about Eberts? Where was he? And Claire too? It didn't make sense. Perhaps they were in trouble too. Darien didn't like that thought. He had enough trouble without having to worry about whether or not his coworkers were in danger of some kind too.

Suddenly, Esther raised her head from her half-eaten dinner, and cocked her ears in the direction of the front door. Swiping a massive tongue about her furry jowls, the dog padded out of the kitchen and into the living room. Darien hadn't seen it, but this was actually a picture-perfect replay of what the dog had done when she'd somehow sensed his presence on the porch. Her tail was low but upcurled at the end, her shaggy head level with her shoulders as she reached the narrow window next to the door.

"Probably some carolers," Gabrielle theorized, but she did not leave the kitchen until the dog began to bark, confirming that there was indeed someone at the door, "Excuse me while I get that."

Instinct made Darien hang back, and he was soon glad that he'd done so, because it wasn't carolers at the door, but a man in a suit, asking Gabrielle if she'd "seen this man" while holding up a photo of Darien that he presumed had been taken just prior to his capture. He knew that voice. It belonged to the man who had questioned him, and it was saying that _he_ was the kidnapper.

Darien waited to hear no more, snatching Nicky up off the dining chair where he'd been set during dinner and going immediately to the sliding glass door.

Hearing the door slide open, Esther left the front door and returned to the kitchen in a bound. Darien barely had time to slip out and slide the door shut when the big white dog hurled all her hundred plus pound weight against the glass, shaking it violently as she snarled at him.

Friendly indeed! The dog looked like she wanted to tear him to shreds. Esther apparently knew a burglar when she saw one, even one that had been invited in by her owner.

Darien didn't wait to see if the dog could break the glass, or if the ruckus would draw attention, but bolted straight across the unfenced backyard, directly into a thin line of trees and thickly planted shrubs that were a flimsy barrier between the yards of the condo owners and what Darien discovered to be the small park on the other side.

It was well that he did so. While the dog failed to break the glass, around either side of the condominium building came the men formerly dressed as Santas, and experience warned that Darien didn't stand a chance against either or both of them so long as they could see him.

Darien knew he couldn't get far or fast. Even if he hadn't been carrying Nicky, it had been a long night. Given the awkwardly held extra twenty plus pounds, Darien couldn't be sure of getting across the park at a run without a misstep. And, of course, if he fell, he would risk hurting Nicky.

The only sensible thing was to duck down near a bush, quicksilver and hope Nicky didn't make a sound. Darien did quickly look around and make sure the park didn't have any visitors, or at least none that would see him. The park closed after dusk, and it wasn't quite late enough for the violators to start emerging. Even though the side of the park facing the street was lined with decorative street lights, its trees merrily decorated, here at the far side Darien was in shadow.

Quicksilvering, ducking down, holding Nicky close, Darien hoped the toddler would stay quiet. Because Nicky had cooed and chirped most of the time Darien had been walking with him, Darien was afraid to move now. Otherwise he might rapidly have exited the park and departed for some other unrelated place, renewing his search for a telephone. As it was, Darien crouched motionless, watching warily as the men burst through into the park and began looking behind and under various things.

Absurdly, it came as a relief to Darien that there was no snow on the ground. If the world was the winter wonderland all the Christmas songs were endlessly glorifying, Darien would have left clear prints in it, as well as knocking it off the bushes he'd burst through to get here. As it was, the snow-free park gravel had barely been marked by his arrival and the bush did not betray his passage.

More than ever before, he felt that whole White Christmas thing was _way_ overrated. Anyway, he'd heard the song and seen the movie, and those were overrated too.

For a time, it seemed as if Darien's escape had been made good. But then suddenly Nicky decided he didn't like things as they were, and he began to fuss. Darien's attempts to shush him were short-lived, as the sound brought the searchers almost directly to them.

Easily, Darien could have put down the baby and fled on his own, evading capture and then finding a way home on his own. Easily, he could have found some unwary pedestrian and lifted their wallet, along with the money he'd need for a bus out of town (after he'd found a bus stop, of course). Darien did not flinch at the term 'coward,' though with all his wiles he would seek to weasel out of having it applied to himself, however richly he might have deserved it at any given moment. And there might have been a certain wisdom in abandoning the child and bringing back help, since Darien had found him relatively unharmed which suggested his captors wanted the baby alive and well for now.

But Darien had never been accused of being wise. At his second conviction, he had been accused by the victim of having no soul. Worse had been said at his third and final. But he did have a soul, and increasingly vocal conscience, and they overrode his instinct for self preservation, as well as his normal cunning which served him in place of wisdom. It would be easy to blame weariness rather than morality, but the truth was that Darien's tiredness would have him simply surrender, or leave Nicky behind because either of those would be easier. But that was not what he did.

It was not the first nor the last time Darien had gone in for something ridiculously, dangerously, even potentially lethally, foolish. But usually when he did things like that, he'd failed to account for how a foolish action might be dangerous or deadly to someone else, rather than himself. Of his own safety he was rather fond and conscious about. After a few nasty altercations with criminal types and a pair of convictions with time served for both, Darien had learned to be cautious of his own physical safety, though he was often reckless in nearly everything else he did.

However, he had recently been given a lesson in consequences of his actions to others, and it had much sobered him, and soured him on the whole notion of doing foolish, reckless things.

But he was tired. He was sore. Madness was tapping more urgently at the back door of his mind, not enough to rattle it yet, but enough that it could not be easily ignored. And the instinct that bid adults to be protective of children was fully awake and alive in him.

So when Nicky cried, he set the boy on the ground and made ready to attack the first man on the scene.

Remembering he was outnumbered and outclassed, Darien chose to keep the Gland active, totally forgetting for the moment that he was supposed to be a well-kept government secret, and that people had a way of becoming even more dangerous when they found out what he was capable of because suddenly they wanted to catch him and study him more than whatever they'd wanted before.

More as a habit than a thought out plan, Darien stood back and let the first thug find the baby, and then jumped him from behind. There weren't any convenient walls to bounce Darien off of out here, but his choke hold still needed a lot of work. The man, about twice his size and seemingly entirely constructed of muscles and concrete, staggered around, trying to shake or pull Darien off. Darien had surprise and tenacity on his side, but not a great deal else.

Thrown clear, Darien hit the ground hard, though reflex made him roll and keep the Gland active. He resisted the urge to cough or gasp, which was difficult because he'd had the wind knocked out of him and his body was highly resentful of having its much needed oxygen so rudely stolen.

"What the hell-..." murmured his adversary, looking around for Darien and not understanding why he couldn't find him, but not seeming to dream for a moment that Darien was invisible.

Darien didn't wait for his imagination to get more active. Going for the larger man in a low rush, Darien managed to knock the unprepared individual to the ground. A good smack of the elbow ended the matter. But only between them, because more were quickly coming, and Nicky's cries were getting more strenuous. Apparently the kid was not ready for violence on television yet.

His second tackle was clumsier than his first, and not so carefully calculated to come from behind. Also, two men had arrived at the same time. There was momentary confusion as one of them began to wrestle an unseen opponent and the other looked on. But when Darien was dislodged and bounced off the ground this time, he lost hold of his invisibility, and also his command of the battle.

Now committed to the violence of battle, it didn't occur to Darien that he might even now surrender and escape further harm. Instead, he staggered to his feet, half-blindly not only because of the dizzying impact with the ground he'd just suffered but the fact that it took his brain a half-second to catch up when he turned quicksilver on and off, and he wasn't giving his brain that precious moment of time.

Inevitable though his defeat now was, Darien went at the battle with zeal, though with no noticeable proficiency. For a brief span, his agility, speed and natural resilience served him in good stead, as did the continuing bafflement of his opponents as to where he had come from. But it wasn't to last, especially when a third man -the one Darien had tackled in the room where Nicky had been held, in fact- entered the fray. The man was not only big, powerful and reasonably well educated in the matter of violence, he had a score to settle, and he wasted no time in settling it.

Shortly thereafter, Darien went down, and stayed there.


	17. Say a Prayer

As Darien struggled back to consciousness for the second time in recent memory, he felt the bruised evidence of the vengeance his final opponent had wrought. And he wondered if maybe he should have stayed unconscious, because that had been much more tolerable.

He did gradually realize that the buzzing in his head wasn't in his head, and it wasn't buzzing. It was the sound of Nicky screeching at full volume, letting the world know in entirely certain terms just what a raw deal he felt life had given him lately.

When finally he had gained the wherewithal to take in his surroundings, Darien found that Nicky had been put in a crib, and that he apparently resented his prison. Darien himself had been either returned to the chair he had escaped from (or else one very much like it), and tied more effectively than the first time. Not only did cord bite into his wrists, it also tied his ankles to the legs of the chair. Further rope had been secured around his chest and through the back of the chair, though this was significantly less of an impediment than would normally be imagined. Darien was fairly certain that, given time, he could wriggle his way out of these bindings just as he had the others.

Many a street performer has made an adequate living getting random strangers to tie him up and then time his escape. At least one canny soul ventured to do it on a unicycle while he was at it.

But the pain all through him, especially his ribs, made him consider it might not be worth it, especially as he now had a guard in the room with him, one of the men he'd decked on the way out during his escape. The man looked like he was just itching for Darien to try and get loose again so he could settle the score as one of his friends already had. Darien was dead set against giving him that chance.

Darien had learned, by dint of painful experience, the cost of a failed escape attempt. And the tapping of Madness at his brain told him some time had passed since he was last conscious, and that he could not repeat his first escape performance without risking Quicksilver Madness.

Yet, though he was hurting, with limited time and still more limited options, Darien did not consider himself defeated. He'd experienced (and effected) last second rescues more than once, and he knew the opera wasn't over until the fat lady sang. Until then, he would be looking for his opportunity.

Throughout his life, Darien's own almost fanatical self-interest had taught him to see (and to seize) opportunities that many other people would have missed. Despite his lifelong avoidance of honest labor, Darien was far from a lazy slacker. It was merely that he enjoyed thrills, easy money and the fine art of theft. It was a craft he had built considerable skill in, and one that required a certain alertness for the weakness and inattention of others, even for the briefest of moments. Carelessness begun and ended in the blink of an eye had been ever enough when he started out pickpocketing. He was a magnificently skilled thief. His weakness when it came to the professions of con and theft was in his conscience, and his conscience had no qualms about escaping and taking Nicky with him.

In the meantime, the man who had questioned him to begin with entered the room. He crossed the room and took a precise seat behind his desk, ignoring the screaming child in the corner.

"Agent Fawkes," he said, "We need to talk about your escape."

"Did I escape?" Darien asked with incredulous tone.

"I'm in no mood for games," the man replied, "Agent Fawkes."

"And I'm in no mood to be tied to a chair," Darien retorted, imitating that annoying way of clipping sentences the man had, "And yet," he paused, then concluded, "Here we are."

Their conversation was punctuated by indignant screeches from the ignored Nicky, who seemed primarily to want out of the crib. Darien didn't blame him. The crib was a smaller prison than the one Darien had originally found him in. After Nicky's moment in the wide outdoors, the crib probably felt even smaller. Since he was currently literally tied to a chair, Darien could sympathize.

"Drop the stupid act," the man demanded, "The way you got out of here, you had to have been using some kind of specialized technology. Since we searched you when you arrived, we know you're not carrying anything like that. Which means it has to be something inside you."

"First of all, I feel violated," Darien said matter-of-factly, "Second of all, you have a truly spectacular imagination. Have you ever thought about makin' movies?"

"My men reported that they couldn't see you when you fought them," the man persisted, "Why is that?"

"They need glasses?" Darien guessed.

"Come now, Agent Fawkes."

"I can't come anywhere," Darien replied, "I'm tied up right now."

"I'm beginning to suspect you really are an idiot," the man commented.

"Can I get that in writing?" Darien asked, "My boss doesn't seem to believe that."

"And who," the man asked, "is your boss?"

"Well, you know The Devil? This guy's kind of like that. Only less posh," Darien answered.

"What's his name?" the man persisted irritably.

"The Devil? Well I guess he also goes by Satan, but really-"

"Your boss!" the man all but shouted, this over the incredible volume of Nicky.

"My boss isn't Satan," Darien corrected effortlessly, "But he plays him on TV."

"Philip, take the kid out of here," the man behind the desk told the guard in the room, "Agent Fawkes and I need to have a... private conversation."

"Really," Darien said, trying to quell the sudden knot of fear in his stomach, "It's nice that you think of me that way, but I'm really not looking for a serious commitment right now. I already have too many obligations," the Madness scratched at the door, asking to get in, and he added, " _Way_ too many."

* * *

Some amount of verbal and physical abuse later, Darien regained consciousness for the third time (or was it the fourth?) tied to a chair and shut in a windowless room full of cheap furniture. Nicky was quietly playing on the floor nearby with a toy truck, and a couple of large men were stationed at the doors. The guards were intimidating, Darien supposed, but he was for some reason immeasurably relieved to find Nicky in the room with him. Not that he got the impression these guys really wanted to hurt the boy right now, but not knowing for certain was more distressing than he cared to admit.

But the most important thing was that Darien hadn't given the man in the suit anything useful. It had become apparent during that interrogation that the man truly had no idea who Darien was or who he worked for. However, Darien hadn't got anything useful out of the man in the suit either, not even his name. He could guess that these were some kind of shadowy government operators, but without confirmation it was only a theory, and theories had a nasty habit of being proven false.

Back where he'd started, but with a weaker body and shorter fuse, Darien was nonetheless reasonably confident. Ever one to make the same mistake twice, he began working at slipping free of the bindings at his wrists just as he had before, one eye on the door guards to make sure they weren't paying attention, the other on Nicky, just to have a distraction from the pain the tightly bound cord was inflicting as he tried to work his way out of it.

Not that he really had a plan for what he would do, but any escape plan had to begin with that all important first step of escaping, and he was noticing a certain lack of attention on the part of the guards. Because they believed he could not get loose, and was hurting too badly to try, they did not watch him as closely as they might have. It was astonishing how much you could get away with while people looked right at you if only they didn't think you could get away with anything.

That was where the true art of illusion came in. And Darien had learned long ago that illusions played a huge role in a good theft. It was easy to steal an unattended wallet on a park bench. But getting that same wallet out of the pocket of its owner while they looked right at you without their ever suspecting you when they later found their wallet empty? That's where the skill started to come in.

He had a hitherto unheard of advantage when it came to distraction. Rather than watching for the usual sort of escape attempt, the guards were looking for something extraordinary. They were waiting for Darien to disappear, or to teleport behind them, or something. That he simply sat in the chair, shifting uncomfortably, didn't get their interest up. Besides which, Nicky would now and then bang the truck loudly on the floor or make an abrupt sound at high volume, and for a blink the guards would look in his direction. It was a tiny distraction, but Darien was willing to take what he could get.

While Darien worked on trying to free his hands, he replayed last night's escape attempt. He couldn't actually see his watch, but he got the sense that the night had passed, and morning had come. He might be wrong, but he was working on that assumption.

In his head, he went over everything he had done, step by step, and everything he had seen along the way. It was not unlike going over in his mind the security and layout of a museum he planned to steal a painting from, or a house he planned to break into the safe of. Museum and home security were usually tighter at night, which was when most robberies occurred. Since there were more guards in this room, Darien had to assume there was tighter security beyond the door than there had been the day before.

He thought he was in the room where he'd originally found Nicky, but he couldn't be completely sure. There were a lot of rooms he hadn't seen the inside of, and one windowless room full of cheap furniture had a way of looking like any other windowless room full of cheap furniture.

This time, Darien thought, he would be sure to pick up some money. He didn't know where his wallet was, but surely one of the guards must be carrying one of their own. He'd be better off with ID, but he'd come across more than one bus stop during his wanderings. If he was lucky, there would be a bus at one of them during the day. A quick, clean escape from the area, assuming these guys didn't have the pull to stop a bus. They'd been bold enough to knock on a door and show a photo of Darien.

So maybe only a bus if nobody was hot on his trail. But money had the potential to help him in a lot of ways. It gave him more options as to what he could do and where he could do, and not making sure to pick up some money had been one of his big blunders the first time.

As he worked, another idea suddenly hit him. It was a crazy idea, but that might also make it a brilliant one, because nobody would expect it, especially given the nature of his first escape attempt. It was perhaps more reckless than a purely rational and less desperate Darien might care to implement, but his sanity was beginning to get a little bit shaky, and he was extremely keen on not being beaten up again.

 _Sometimes,_ he told himself hopefully, _a little insanity can be a good thing._

He just hoped that this would be only a little insanity, and that this would be one of those times. If this went wrong, it was probably going to go very wrong, more wrong than his first escape attempt. Because if this went wrong, Darien might just be bringing on the Madness that much more quickly.

But he also knew that, sooner or later, if he failed to get out of here, the Madness would be coming anyway. Because, for him, Madness was as inevitable as Christmas, and as punctual as Santa Claus.


	18. Can an Angel Lose Their Way?

Darien was intensely aware of the nerves gathering as the time to act approached. So much could go so wrong so fast and, if it did, Darien knew that he would get no third shot. He did his best not to gasp or give any sign at all when the cord finally slipped and his abraded wrists were free.

The following steps were trickier, not because they were more difficult, but because they were in full view of both guards. Somehow, Darien had to slip the cord around his chest and the chair back, and also the ties at his ankles to the base of the chair, all before either guard could draw a weapon or cross the room to stop him. This while they were looking right at him.

Neat trick, if you could do it.

It was tempting to simply goad one of the guards into approaching him, and punching the guard when he got close enough, then quicksilver while the body of the one guard was blocking line of sight for the other. But Darien couldn't guarantee a knockout. And besides, he wasn't sure he could later sell that he had simply pulled the disappearing act of a thousand stage illusionists, and that no magic (or actual invisibility) was involved. He was already losing credibility on that one. He didn't need to add fuel to that fire if he could possibly help it. Especially since he was counting on the Gland to save him.

Him and Nicky.

Realizing that in the latter's presence lay his answer, Darien looked down at where Nicky still played with the truck. The child did not look up at him, much too busy trucking to notice any boring adult watching him play. Darien needed to somehow make the guards as distracted as Nicky presently was. In Darien's limited experience, a fussy child was extremely distracting, even if you didn't intend to do anything about it. The human brain just naturally focused hearing on the sound, and triggered the eye to search for the source. Darien didn't especially want to make Nicky cry, but he much less wanted the both of them to remain in their kidnapped state.

Once Darien had hit on the idea, the method was obvious. Nicky's truck had been all over the room, bumping into several solid objects. Nicky had not yet learned that a truck goes the way its wheels do, and he had unleashed it a number of times with the intention of it going a certain way, but the direction of its wheels insured it did not follow the direction it was pushed. The net result was that the truck routinely hit things. It had bounced off every piece of furniture in here at least once. It had also, as it happened, bounced off of several shoes. Most often it had hit Darien himself, because Nicky chose to play nearer to him than to either of the guards.

Patience. That was Darien's answer. Sooner or later, the truck would hit him again. And, when it did, the truck would go away. That should upset Nicky sufficiently to gain the momentary attention of the guards, enough time for Darien to get loose and set his plan rolling forward.

As with so many plans, this one did not work out quite in the way Darien had intended. As he had anticipated, the truck was fired off, and it hit him. As expected, Nicky toddled over to get it. As he had been trained, Darien dug into the precision control of the Gland, and it did as he bid it. It was a lot easier to quicksilver something he touched with his hand, but he could not only quicksilver anything he wore, but anything touching what he was wearing, including a shoe. The truck, as planned, disappeared while Nicky's body was hiding it from the view of the guards, so that they could not see what happened and might assume Nicky had launched the truck again, this time behind a chair or desk or other piece of furniture. The truck was small enough and rolled well enough that it could go almost anywhere.

But that was as far as things went the way Darien had foreseen.

For Nicky had learned Darien's secret, more easily than any adult could have. At his age, the majority of the world was unexpected and inexplicable, and there was so much he didn't know that it didn't even occur to him to wonder if a thing was possible if he'd never heard of it before. Nobody had ever told him that people and objects couldn't turn invisible. There were varying opinions of when and to what level object permanence develops in infants and toddlers, but Nicky was old enough by most standards that it could be assumed he knew that the vanishment of an object did not mean it was simply gone forever. But now he went a step further. As he stared at Darien, it seemed that he knew precisely where the truck had actually gone, and who had made it go there.

The look of perplexed betrayal that Nicky aimed at him cut Darien to the core not only because he had not expected this response, but because the look was one of such agonized tragedy. Because he had been playing with it, the toy truck had become all but the very center of Nicky's entire existence, almost as if it were his reason for being, and the thing that anchored him to his place in the world. To him in that particular moment, there was nothing of greater value. From Nicky's perspective, the truck was not only all he wanted, but the only thing he had ever wanted, and the only thing he ever could want. Taken more objectively, none of that was accurate, but Nicky did not -indeed could not- view it that way. But the worst part of it for Darien was that Nicky did not look at him with anger as perhaps the majority of toddlers might when their toys were removed from them, only a helpless and abiding sorrow, a hurt confusion at this breach of innocent trust.

Pained at sight of the tears welling up in Nicky's eyes, Darien was tempted to just forget the whole thing and give him back his truck. He wanted to tell Nicky that he'd buy the kid a million trucks if they got out of this alive, but of course he couldn't. He couldn't even let the way he felt show in his expression, because that would surely be a tip off to the guards that something was amiss and that they should pay extra attention to him. He had to sit, and wait, and hope.

Nicky moved away from him, towards the middle of the room a few toddling steps. Then he sat there and began to bawl, long and loud and most distractingly. Darien let out a sigh of relief, but it was a surprisingly painful one, sympathetic hurt for the pain he'd inflicted on a toddler.

He felt like a monster, even knowing his own reasons for doing it.

"Not again," grumbled one guard to the other.

"What's his problem now?"

They didn't sound at all sympathetic, and Darien felt an irrational surge of anger towards them for their lack of compassion that surprised him by its ferocity. The anger was most startling not by the hot way it burned in Darien's brain, but for the fact that it was directed solely at the moment. It was not that they were kidnappers in the first place, it was that they had no sympathy for a child's lost truck. For that, murderous thoughts made their presence felt in Darien's mind, suggesting a burst of violent things he could do to either or both guards to pay them back a thousandfold for their lack of sympathy.

He knew then that Madness was closer than ever.

"The kid's lost his truck again," one of the guards noticed.

"Probably under the desk again," the other replied, "Wish he'd learn to find the damn thing himself."

As Darien had hoped, they not only looked away from him, but actually moved away from their doors to look for the truck. They didn't even give Darien a warning glance. They were confident that he was not only restrained, but that he was beaten in spirit as much as in body. Overconfidence feels good, and may even have its advantages, but it takes a heavy toll.

On the instant, Darien quicksilvered his arms so their motion would not attract notice, and at once slipped the cord from around his chest over his head. Losing the quicksilver because it wouldn't help him now, Darien bent over and worked to free both ankles. With his hands free, it was a simple task, for the restraints had been placed under the assumption that he could not leave the chair or use his hands, and now he could do both. Immediately his action drew notice, and shouting.

More time would've been nice, but it was as much as Darien could have hoped for, and he had accomplished exactly what he had to. Now came the hard part.

As the guards converged on him, Darien picked up the chair to which he'd been bound, and threw it at the one on his left. The guard didn't have time to duck, and simply threw up his hands to thwart the object in its headward flight. Dodging between where this guard stood and where Nicky sat, Darien bolted for the door. He had to leave Nicky behind, there was no other choice. At the same time, he was hoping the chair would not accidentally hit Nicky when it bounced off the guard's upraised arms, though he could not wait to see. He had the flashing of a second to cross the room, open the door, get through it and slam it behind him. He had time for nothing else.

This time the alarms came almost instantly to life. But Darien had quicksilvered by the time the door had closed behind him, and the few beats it took for the guards to open both doors were sufficient for them to assume he'd ducked through a door into another room. The search began immediately.

Darien stood with his back pressed to the wall, watching the guards as they swung open doors and looked hurriedly into rooms. More men quickly pounded up the stairs, and in pairs began to search all the rooms in the hallway, certain Darien could not have gotten far.

A smile pulled at the corners of Darien's mouth. His sense of mischief was tickled by the futilely frantic search. But a colder, darker feeling of superiority also filtered through. This was not Darien's arrogance, but that of the Quicksilver Madness. Time and again, Darien had been told that all it did was throw off the inhibitions of conscience and bring out his nastier impulses, he knew better. Let all the scientists say what they wanted, Darien knew that it was like having a second sentience, an evil personality underneath his own. It was him, and it was also not him. It was a monster under the surface that was not his own, but a separate entity sharing his mind. The Gland had a will of its own. The satisfaction in his own cleverness was his, but the smug superiority over the guards' stupidity was not.

From time to time, Darien was obligated to move in order to stay out of the way of the searchers, but he moved without hurry, waiting for the shouting and recriminations to start coming thick and fast, and then for the bewildered but still confident searchers to move out, around the corners of the hall and down the stairs. Once the immediate area was clear, Darien returned to the vacated room.

Casually, he stepped over the still crying Nicky. He freed the truck from its quicksilver prison, and then strolled over to the desk and, more importantly, to the phone. Nicky proved to not currently be interested in the truck, because the alarms were his new problem. In fact, he didn't appear to even notice the truck. But that was no longer Darien's concern.

Darien picked up the phone, dialed the familiar number, and waited. This time, someone picked up.

"Hey, Eberts," Darien said, "How hard is it to trace a number?" he paused to listen to the response, then continued, "How about if I give you some street names and you find them on a map."

* * *

Five minutes later, shaking off the last of the quicksilver, Darien picked up the chair he'd thrown and put it back where he'd gotten it. His intention had been to return to the chair, put back the restraints and pretend he had never escaped. But the Madness clawing viciously at his sanity now suggested that he should do something else. Yes, it would be amusing to see the incomprehension, the confusion and perhaps even superstitious dread spread across the faces of the guards who were _so_ _sure_ he'd escaped.

But that required he relinquish physical control of the situation. It meant he had to trust other people to come and save him. It meant a passive return to subservience to The Agency, trading one prison for another. And besides, the feeling would be fleeting, and also tainted by his own helplessness. What kind of idiot intentionally, willingly left himself vulnerable like that? The very idea was disgusting.

Instead, it came to Darien that, while he was free, he could roam the building, and find that bastard who kept clipping words like the feathers of birds to keep them from flying, and who'd beaten Darien into unconsciousness for not answering questions. He could find that man, and extract some payback while he was waiting for The Agency to get their act together.

A devilish look in his eyes, Darien quicksilvered, and left the room.


	19. Gonna Trash Your Home

The little imp of mischief ever lurking inside of Darien had changed to a big, ugly goblin of menace. His mind had not been rendered devoid of amusement, but there was a deadliness to it, as he embarked upon his course of wanton destruction. Succumbed to Madness, he lost the thread of logic that had sent him forth, and the self-restraint that bade him keep the secret of the Invisible Man.

While he had a sought-for objective, the Madness not only ripped from him any compunction he might have had about visiting violence upon whoever or whatever he encountered, it also stole from him comprehension of consequence. He sensed in it the possibility of a deeper Madness, one that might know some sort of perverted reason, but that was not his now. The Madness which possessed him now was driven by burning desire and ravenous need for instant gratification that overwhelmed any thought for the future (his own or anyone else's), a bottomless selfishness and deathless sense of entitlement that rendered him fully indifferent to the wants and needs of others.

He was contemptuous of his earlier caution. Who cared if they realized an invisible being was among them? Having asserted itself, his Madness made the very idea of limiting his invisibility seem ludicrous. The sooner these idiots learned to fear him and what he could do, the better. Actually, it might be hilarious if they simply assumed a spook had come after them.

In fact, that idea struck him as so funny that he tried it out at once, on the first thug he could find.

Darien tapped on the man's shoulder, dodging out of the way as the man swung around and was met with what appeared to be an empty hallway. Darien swiftly reached around and tapped the other shoulder, and the man spun wildly in a way Darien found so hysterical that he laughed.

Terrified of the empty air that now seemed to be mocking him, the man gibbered something that might have been trying to be a question as to who or what it was that was molesting him. But he was not coherent, and Darien was not patient enough to find out what he wanted to say.

"I'm the Ghost of Christmas Present," Darien announced loudly to his ashen-faced adversary, "And that boy you've taken is Ignorance. I'm here to get him back."

Delighted with the cleverness of his own joke, Darien proceeded to kick the man in the shins and then pushed him so that he fell over. After that, Darien really laid into him, striking him repeatedly about the face until he stopped getting a response, at which point he became bored, and remembered his mission.

Merrily he went on his way, kicking open each door he came to because the absence of any but the most rudimentary and flawed logic meant he suspected his target could be behind any random door anywhere in the building, and it seemed to him that kicking open doors was the way to find that hated individual. Of course, he also enjoyed the cracking and snapping of the doors as they caved in, and the sense of power he gained from the use of physical force satisfied him.

In the end, his Madness wasn't really about anything more than power, both its achievement and proof in even the most petty of ways. It gave him the sense that he was all-powerful, but at the same time told him that everyone and everything around him was seeking to take his power, and that he must constantly assert himself. Since all he himself now understood was violence, it was his self-centered assumption that this was all anyone else understood either.

Rage came easily to such a mind, and Darien soon grew to find the door kicking tiresome. The moment he did, he swept on past boredom at the repetition, beyond annoyance at not finding what he wanted and went by mere frustration, free falling directly in a fiery fury, which he directed at the first hapless person he laid eyes on. This so happened to be one of the guards, come to investigate all the noise.

Without pausing to so much as make a quip, Darien pounced on his prey, and pummeled it into unconsciousness. He might have continued his assault, had the arrival of yet another person just coming off the stairs distracted him from his pretty plan of beating a man to death with his bare hands.

And too, an inert foe was not terribly interesting, venting anger on something that did not react was not at all fulfilling. So Darien, still quicksilvered, flew at once to dispatch this latest enemy, who would hopefully try in vain to fend him off, and ideally scream in terror.

What actually happened was that Darien's reckless lunge threw his full weight down on his wholly unprepared foe, who lost balance and fell, sending them both tumbling down the stairs in a right unloving embrace. Oblivious of, or perhaps even enjoying, the pain as he bounced off sternly concrete stair and metal safety railing, Darien continued to attack his opponent, who sought only not to land on his head at the bottom. Darien had no such concern for future events.

Consequently, he hit the foot of the stairs _hard_. Darien was lucky not to crack a rib or even snap his neck. Fully unaware of any danger to himself, he writhed out from under the moron who'd landed on him, and proceeded to soundly punish the offense with a series of kicks which was ended by the sight of year another man, this one with weapon drawn uncertainly.

He had seen his companion inexplicably tumble down the stairs, and he had seen the body twitch and jerk as with an impact, but he could not see Darien. Fear and confusion clouded his features. The man's weapon, stance and clothing made Darien think of a government agent, and his easily ignited rage flamed anew. His body was demanding air to replace that which had been lost, and he sucked it in obligingly with a noise that sounded almost like an animal snarl. The man with the gun began to tremble. This amused Darien, and somewhat cooled the flames of anger, slowing him down.

It struck him that it would be fun to toy with this man for awhile, in the way a cat would play with a mouse before killing and devouring it, leaving behind a bloodstain on the family rug.

But the noise Darien had made generally indicated his location. And as he advanced on the shivering man, he made no attempt to be silent. In fact, not only did he make the regular sounds a person does on a hard floor when they don't try to be silent, he actually issued a low growl, which added to the terror in the other man's eyes, terror which Darien reveled in.

Carelessness cost him, however. Filled with horror at the unseen monster, the man nonetheless had the wit to pull the trigger. His panic-induced shaking meant his aim was terrible, but at that range he could hardly have missed entirely. Indeed, the piece of fired metal cleaved its noisy way through the air, and ripped a deep and searingly painful graze across the upper part of Darien's left arm.

This was not a new sensation to Darien. The impact threw off his balance, but he managed not to fall onto his back, merely letting it throw back his arm and shoulder and try to pull the rest of his upper body with it. But all humor was at once gone from his brain. This infraction was sufficient to surpass all others, and the incandescent rage which filled him seemed to be greater than any other he'd felt thus far. It was all consuming, and it wasn't just that he wanted to stop this man from moving, he wanted this man to stop _existing_. He didn't just want to kill him, he wanted to obliterate the body afterward.

With a roar which was all but inhuman, Darien shed the quicksilver coating in favor of flinging every atom of energy into this battle. The man was too startled to fire a second time, or even to raise a hand in his own defense. He never stood a chance, but Darien did not care. Fire scorched through his consciousness, and demanded immediate retaliation against this worthless piece of human flesh that had dared try to hurt him. For him in that moment, there was nothing else, and there had never been anything else. There was only this hate. The desire to destroy was all that had ever existed.

Rudely, he was interrupted in his gleeful pursuit of bloody murder by shouting, and another fired shot. This had been an attempt to distract him, as the shooter realized he was actively nearing success at the endeavor of pulverizing another human. The shot was enough to make him forget all about the victim he had now, and to completely focus all of his attention on the two newcomers to the fray.

He did not so much as flinch, but quicksilvered and went running down the hall to try and kick their heads in. He lack of target selection cost him, however, as he ineffectually attempted to attack both men at once, something he was not nearly big enough, strong enough or skilled enough to succeed at.

Despite his own ignorance of the fact, the rapid and shifting activity was extracting its dire price from his energy reserves. Though consciously oblivious to pain, Darien could not entirely force his body to ignore it. A blow from his left arm landed clumsily, and the jarring pain rattled his concentration without his even noticing the lapse. When he hauled back for a right-cross like he'd seen on TV a million times over, he shifted his weight to the leg that the Rottweiler puppy had earlier used as a chew toy. The muscles of that leg resented the unwonted weight, and further resented his brain's ignorance of their suffering, and all at once decided that until he do something to rectify these cruel working conditions, they would simply go on strike.

The result being that his leg collapsed under him and he fell over. Fresh bolts of pain shot through him as already forming bruises were further abused. These minor annoyances were like flies buzzing about the head of a frothingly rabid dog. They infuriated him, but they also crippled him. He began to curse aloud at everyone and no one, speaking long strings of epithets that in no way formed meaningful sentences. And he again lost control of the Gland. Like so much shattering glass, the quicksilver fell.

But by then Darien had regained his feet, and his battered and shudderingly frightened and bewildered foes were not in good shape. He managed to take them down, but then stood swaying, looking up and down the hall, having forgotten entirely what it was he'd been trying to do.

Exhausted, bloodied, angry but directionless, he wasn't sure where to go or what to do. His desire now was for quiet. He could not escape the buzzing in his own head, of course, but beyond that was the clamorous alarm system. Darien shook his head, and swung his head to look for the speakers from whence that hateful sound was coming from. He no longer sought a flesh and blood foe, but a maddening incorporeal enemy that shrieked down at him from points unseen.

Until he spotted a speaker. He looked around quickly for a means of destruction. He did not remember the guns so much as see one lying on the floor. He picked it up, aimed it in the speaker mounted in the upper corner of the wall, and fired. He fired repeatedly. Fired until the gun was empty. Angry at it when it clicked uselessly, Darien snarled and hurled it at the sparking and shattered speaker like a rock. His aim was true, and the gun smashed into the dead speaker with tremendous force.

Darien could still hear the alarms, but they were further away. Shaking his head in a futile attempt to rid his ears of the godawful sound, Darien cast about for more projectiles to hurl, and more speakers to destroy. He wanted the noise to stop. Wanted that more than anything. He stepped over the inert bodies of the people he'd savagely beaten into unconsciousness, no more interested in them than if they had been insects littering the path. He actually stepped on one of them without particularly noticing.

Anger is one of the most tiring emotions to sustain, especially the all-consuming kind Darien was experiencing in fits and starts. Ordinarily, it was impossible to maintain because of the sheer cost of energy, and the fact that the logic centers of the brain won't stand for being blatantly ignored in the way that one must ignore them during an out-of-control fit of temper. The sort of anger Darien was experiencing was the kind that normally comes in a flash, burning itself out almost as soon as it arrives, surviving just long enough for maybe a primal scream, a good punch of the nearest wall, or the theatrical sweeping of a desk. But Darien's Madness allowed that anger to not only burn far hotter than was in any way normal, but for longer.

Yet even this Madness-given fury must have some upward limit, some ceiling against which it must crash before falling back to Earth. Surely there had to be some end to it. But so far, Darien had never met the furthest extent to which he would go to satisfy this need to prove his power, or to exert his homicidal mania on the world around him. He had never met it, and he did not want to.

But, just now, it did not seem that there was anyone or anything around that could stop him.

Of course, that was not actually true. As Darien had begun his rampage, the man who had questioned him -and that he had originally identified as dangerous- went into action of his own.

With the cunning of a survivor, he had foreseen that Darien's next escape attempt would be more dramatic than his first. He had not fully expected this level of carnage, for he had gotten the impression that Darien really preferred things to be bloodless, but though it caught him by surprise, it did not stun him into inefficacy. Instead, he simply changed plans. And then, when security cameras told him that Darien was viciously attacking the wall-mounted speakers, he changed plans again.

Going to the board in the control room, he turned some speakers off, and left others on. These Darien proceeded to follow for awhile, smashing them with anything handy he picked up, periodically breaking off to kick his way into a room and pick up more projectiles when the bullets in the gun he was carrying inevitably ran out. Darien did not wonder why he didn't run into anymore people.

The reason was that his original target had fully realized how dangerous he was, and preferred to keep his men out of it if that was at all possible. For awhile it certainly seemed to be.

But then Darien suddenly got bored of throwing things at inanimate objects. To keep him on the desired course, men were contacted via radio to draw his notice, with the warning that he could turn invisible. The lure worked. Darien saw and went after them, with full abandonment of any caution (including that of quicksilver). Recklessness and weariness combined to disadvantage him, and he was shoved unceremoniously through a doorway. The door was shut, and a chair braced against its handle to keep it from turning, effectively locking Darien in a room, specifically in the basement part of the building.

Like a furious, maneating tiger, the Madness had been caged in a pit of darkness.


	20. What Christmas is All About

Rod Herriot had not idea just what it was that he'd locked up in the basement, but he knew that it wasn't human. Not as he understood humans anyway. He had assumed that Agent Fawkes had been carrying some sort of device that had been missed, or that he was using some sort of exceptional training. The invisibility was jarring enough, but Rod had seen plenty of fights, and he knew there was something utterly inhuman about Fawkes, especially once he started going after the sound of the alarm as if it were another enemy. There was a ferocious efficacy to his combat, between times there was an utter lack of reason and focus. Not only did his actions make no sense in a larger context, they weren't even internally consistent. It was just violence for the sake of violence.

Not inexperienced in such matters, Rod was able to deduce that this was not something functioning as intended. Whatever bizarre science experiment was going on with Agent Fawkes, it had gone _wrong_. Rod hoped that he'd seen the end of it in locking Fawkes in the room in the basement. There was nothing important in there he could break, but Rod was far from certain that he could not escape. Considering all that Fawkes had demonstrated he could do in those few minutes of rampage, Rod was far from confident that he couldn't find a way out of the room.

There weren't any cameras in that room, but men stationed outside had report a prolonged silence, and that it now sounded as if Fawkes were slamming himself against walls and doors and anything else he found, seeking an exit by violent means, apparently without regard for whether or not he hurt himself.

It didn't make sense to Rod. Why would anyone send this freak of mad science to retrieve the Shepherd boy? The Agent Fawkes that had ripped through the building mere minutes ago was just as likely to tear the head off a screaming child as he was to shoot bullets into a speaker until his gun registered as empty. Rod could see that something had snapped between his last conversation with Fawkes and the second escape attempt, if indeed it _was_ an escape attempt, which it really didn't appear to be.

But whoever had set him loose must have known there was a monster lurking beneath the surface of that idiot's annoying but evidently harmless sense of charm and humor. Rod did not believe for a minute that the Department of Fish & Game owned such an asset.

The question was, what to do with him now that they had him?

* * *

Darien, meanwhile, had neither concerns nor questions. There wasn't room in his mind for any of that, for his every thought had been overtaken by a single imperative: _escape_.

One thing Darien had in common with his darker self (if that's truly what Madness was), was a deep and abiding loathing of captivity of any sort. The difference was that this dark side had no sense of patience, no real cleverness to speak of, aside from an intermittent cunning edge to the savagery that hinted of a more devious monster lurking beneath the surface of the rabid persona.

But more than the hatred of captivity was the semi-conscious awareness that staying here would lead to an even more hated captivity, the kind that came out of a needle. Darien had given warning that Madness was imminent. Now drunk with it, he didn't want to go back. The part of Darien that was still himself was not wasting energy now. Any bit of sanity he was able to call forth had to be timed with the arrival of Hobbes and whoever came with him, to try and stop himself from killing them. Until then, the Madness was given absolute freedom, and used that as license to hurl Darien's body against anything that felt like it could be broken if sufficient force was applied to it.

If there had been an ounce of sense leftover, Darien should have concentrated his efforts on the barred door. But the darkness of the room was disorienting, and the Madness unreasoning. The fragmented logic went that anything that _could_ be broken, _should_ be broken.

There was a determined mindlessness to it, as if the Madness resented the very idea of logical analysis, which would surely expose the futility of the energetic effort. The very notion of cause and effect was hated for it represented restraint, which to a Maddened brain is much the same as captivity, and the aforementioned hatred of that forbade any tolerance of anything that resembled it.

All of this led to the cause of the noise Rod Harriot's men were hearing from outside. The basement room was storage, with shelves and various miscellaneous objects, all of which Darien threw himself heartily into the absolute demolition of with a single mindedness only an insane person was capable of.

With no way of measuring time, and indeed no inclination to, Darien didn't know how long he had been imprisoned when a sudden ruckus above chanced to interrupt the joyously destructive rending apart of some fabric object his hands had chanced to come across. He paused, tilting his head. Shouting. Shooting. It annoyed him not to be part of it. And he heard a voice for which he currently had nothing but contempt. Hobbes was shouting, not just at the adversaries he encountered, but shouting for Darien.

A low growl of resentment welled in Darien's throat. Hobbes wanted to put the genie back in the bottle, stuff the cork back in place, cram Darien back into that conscience ridden carcass of self-denial and sickening sense of morality and justice. It had happened before. Darien remembered. In his sane mind, he would have been unspeakably relieved to hear Hobbes. But now... Darien wanted only to kill him.

In this world of Madness, Darien didn't remember or care how furious anything had made him before. He could not compare his earlier hatred of the blaring alarm with his current hatred of the voice of his friend. In his perception, each new thing which induced rage was the thing he had ever hated the most, and he had never been angrier than he was now. The Madness meant he did not even perceive how easily distracted he was from things which he hated with ever fiber of his being, didn't realize his all-consuming rage was constantly being reignited and redirected. He lacked the sense of it.

Gradually, the sounds above died down. But Darien waited, a modicum of patience seeping through the vicious hysteria, partially directed by his own physical exhaustion. He could ignore it all he liked, but his body demanded rest and oxygen, and at some point the demand became greater than his maddened will. So he crouched in the shadows behind a shelf, waiting for the door to be opened, knowing that Hobbes would inevitably come for him, and that a struggle must ensue.

A series of thuds told of the guards outside the door being disabled. And then Hobbes' voice came, muffled but comprehensible, through the closed door.

"Fawkes?" he inquired, then when he didn't get a response he added, "Fawkes, we're comin' for ya, just hang in there," this was followed by the sound of the chair being shoved aside, and the door opened slowly, letting a sliver of light into the blackened interior, and Hobbes' questing voice again called for him, "Fawkesy? You in her, buddy?"

Darien had anticipated everything up to this moment, the disdain for counter-agent and the control it represented edging aside the thoughtlessly violent aspect of his Madness, demanding that he exert patience and thought in order to destroy this all-important menace. But what he had not anticipated was his own sudden interference, or even its nature. Ever his saner half would try to put a halt to his endeavors to murder Hobbes, and up to now either he had managed to hinder himself sufficiently for Hobbes to get the upper hand, or Hobbes own skill would save him.

But in the dark, the advantage belonged to Madness. Even with a flashlight, lured into the black room, Hobbes would be more disadvantaged than ever before. But suddenly Darien felt his patience snap, and a wail rose within him, escaping his throat as he realized he had just ruined his own plan as he lunged through the door at Hobbes, hitting his shoulder resoundingly on the frame on his way.

He hit Hobbes full in the chest, but the animal wail had given Hobbes the warning he needed to thwart a concentrated attempt to throttle him. Worse still, Hobbes was not alone. The Keeper was there as well. He noticed her almost too late, as the needle struck him in the arm. But he was just fast enough, forgetting Hobbes in order to turn on Claire, backhanding her across the face before she could hit the plunger and inject him with the despised substance.

Angrily, he ripped out the needle and threw it to the floor, flew at her. Hand at her throat, he yanked her roughly to her feet and pinned her against the wall. He tilted his head, an eager thought coming into his head that revolted his saner self, who had no power here, having thrown all his chips down on that blind lunge for Hobbes. His saner self had known Claire would be here.

Claire _was_ an attractive woman, and the way she now cringed from him was _so_ sweet. And she, above all others, represented confinement, and restraint. She not only made and administered the counter-agent, but had also literally branded onto his wrist a silent demand that he become his own jailor, willingly giving himself into her care on a regular basis, putting his mental freedom into a box. She was always dominating him, telling him what to do, and criticizing him, making him do what she wanted.

But now... he could turn the tables.

Without subtlety or hesitation, he slid his body towards hers, pressing her against the wall with his entire self, his eyes locked on hers, looking down at her, waiting for the slow dawning comprehension... and reveling in the horror and fear that followed.

"Darien, no," Claire said, but she sounded weak, and he just grinned at her.

Then suddenly he felt a pain in his neck, the prick of a needle. A hand clamped itself painfully on his opposite shoulder hauling him back even as the counter-agent flooded its way into his system, bringing sanity crashingly back, along with a strangling sense of self-revulsion at what he had almost... had tried... actually... wanted to do. He collapsed back, half from relief and half from horror, his legs folding up under him as he lost balance in his hurry to put distance between himself and Claire.

Shivering, whimpering, he met the floor before Hobbes could catch him on the way down, and curled up, becoming aware all at once of all he'd been doing, thinking and feeling since the Madness took over. He hated it, hated it more than anything. Someday, he knew, the counter-agent would not come soon enough. Someday, it would not be enough. And that terrified him.

"Easy, Fawkes," Hobbes suggested, sliding an arm under his head so he wouldn't hit the floor, "Take it easy. You're alright. Everything's alright now."

His voice has never been built to sound soothing or comforting. But nothing had ever sounded so good to him as Hobbes' voice did just then. It wasn't just the words, it was that harder edge, that tough sound that assured Darien that -had there been no other way- Hobbes would have killed him to protect Claire. And that, in the moment, was more important than anything else.

Finding his own voice, but unable to articulate anything of what he'd recently experienced, Darien was able only to say, "Nicky's here. He's upstairs. Nicky's here."

"Yeah, Fawkesy, we know," Hobbes said, "We know."

"He's here," Darien repeated, unable to think of any other words to put with the statement.

"It's alright, Darien," Claire said gently, "We found him before we found you."

In response to this, Darien only whimpered, his powers of language currently too weak to come up with anything else. He continued to shiver, processing, forcing himself to accept, to recognize that it had all been caused by the Madness, that it wasn't him that had done any of it, that he couldn't be held accountable, even to himself, no matter what it felt like.

Gently taking the syringe out of Darien's skin without letting go of him while Claire softly patted him reassuringly, Hobbes said, "Merry Christmas, Fawkesy."


	21. Where Souls Have Been Lost

"Come on, Fawkes, I don't get what you're so unhappy about," Hobbes said.

Darien, sanity restored, had fallen asleep almost immediately, utterly spent by recent events. He'd woken up later in the Keep, being patched up. He'd gone back to sleep almost at once. Claire had decided that he would be happier and more comfortable in his own bed during his recovery.

In truth, despite the extent of all that had happened, and all he'd done, the damage wasn't too bad. Not only had Darien somehow managed not to break any bones, even in his unspeakably dangerous tumble down the stairs when he tackled the one guy, but he also hadn't actually killed anyone. Some of them had broken bones though, most had taken considerable damage to their skulls (damage which Claire recommended pointing out if any of them started talking about invisible people).

Hobbes had discovered the reason behind the kidnapping with ridiculous ease when he talked to some of the spooks he knew. Mrs. Shepherd had worked for a secret agency of the government for many years, but had retired from the game a few years ago. During her employment at this unnamed agency (which sounded familiar, of course), she had exposed corruption in other agents, who had been fired. Still holding a grudge years later, they had decided to kidnap her son to get even, though they had likely never had intention of harming him, and had even lined up a family that had agreed to take care of him without asking questions. Several of them had found employment with other government agencies after their corruption had been uncovered, and no doubt could have gotten tidy little promotions if they'd been able to bring an invisible man to their bosses. Now, of course, they were going to jail for multiple charges of kidnapping and assault.

Nicky was, as promised, returned to his family in the condition he'd been in at the time he was stolen, sleepy and just a little bit fussy, but unharmed in any way.

But it hadn't escaped anyone's notice that Darien was quiet and rather downcast, and had been ever since they'd found him. It was clear that something had happened, something that deeply upset him, but he had so far been reticent and refused to talk about it to anyone.

"You're the first guy in the Agency to ever convince The Official to give you Christmas week off," Hobbes persisted, "Granted, it's unpaid time off, but that's still gotta feel good, doesn't it?"

Darien didn't respond to this. He was lying on his bed facing away from Hobbes, partially curled up, a hand subconsciously over the place where a bullet had grazed him, staring at -but not really seeing- the wall in front of him. He wasn't really listening to Hobbes.

"Fawkesy?" Hobbes inquired, recognizing the lack of response, "You okay, buddy?"

The edge of worried concern to his voice drew Darien from his haze enough to realize that Hobbes was probably thinking of Quicksilver Madness, even though it wasn't time for another shot yet. He didn't like it when Darien turned away and went quiet, because sometimes that meant Darien was about to try and kill him. The realization drove Darien to at last respond.

"Yeah," he said, but the misery in his voice betrayed the lie, "Yeah, Hobbes, I'm okay."

There was a prolonged silence. Hobbes was not famous for his insight, or his sensitivity, but he sometimes picked up on things, and one thing he recognized was ill-concealed pain when he heard it.

"No you're not," Hobbes sighed, "You ain't been right since we found you. How come?"

Gentleness and sympathy were not much in Hobbes' nature, and he was unbelievably awkward at them. But the fact that he was straining his abilities so in response to the silent distress of his friend finally stirred something in Darien, who up to that point had been unable to actually articulate what was bothering him. Now, it came in a single rush of words.

"I betrayed him, Hobbes," Darien opened up, "I took his truck and I ran out on him and I betrayed him and... he's never gonna know why."

Darien had told his story, start to finish, more than once, though those earlier tellings had not put such emphasis on this particular detail, a detail which had seemed fairly irrelevant to his audience. In fact, the momentary hangup he'd had at this point in the story each time he told it had been assumed to be related to the Madness which had shortly followed.

Hobbes was silent a moment, then exclaimed, "That's what this is about? You saved that kid's life! You brought him home. He probably doesn't even remember the truck."

"You didn't see the look in his eyes," Darien replied quietly.

"Fawkes," Hobbes began, then stopped and sighed, "Fawkes, you did what you had to. If you'd done anything else, you'd probably have lost your head in the room with the kid, and then he wouldn't just feel betrayed, he'd probably be dead."

"If that was meant to make me feel better, it didn't," Darien said.

He knew, of course, that Hobbes was right. If he'd let the Madness in while still in the room with Nicky, he could've killed the boy. Nicky was so small and fragile, that a Maddened Darien could hardly have avoided seriously hurting him at least. But the fact that it hadn't happened didn't make up for the sick feeling that it _could_ have happened. Nor did it improve his feelings with regards to what _had_ happened.

"You saved the kid and got him home," Hobbes persisted, "What more do you want?"

"He believed in me," Darien said simply, "And I let him down."

"And I used to believe in Santa," Hobbes answered, "But he never came down my chimney."

Even preoccupied with his own misery, Darien heard a pain in Hobbes' voice that he couldn't ignore. He turned over a little, so he could look at Hobbes. Hobbes looked dead serious, so Darien decided his friend hadn't just been making some kind of poor attempt at a joke to get his attention.

"You?" Darien asked in some surprise, "You believed in Santa?"

"Sure," Hobbes replied.

"Did you run a background check on him?" Darien inquired, half-joking.

"No!" Hobbes snapped, "I asked my dad if he was legit."

Darien inclined his head slightly, understanding coming to him before Hobbes continued.

"My dad gave me the whole bit. That Santa comes and delivers presents to good girls and boys, and can see you all the time. Of course I was horrified that there was some sky man watching me," Hobbes continued, "Judging me. That was one of the worst things I'd felt. 'course, I was a little kid, so I didn't have a lot of experience. I hadn't learned that there's always eyes watching, wherever you go."

Darien said nothing, sensing the worst was coming.

"Money had been tight that year, both parents working, no time to shop until the last minute," Hobbes' voice fell, and he started looking at the floor, and made frequent pauses that Darien didn't take advantage of, "Ma was out on her own that night. Some idiot hit her car and drove away. And then some other idiot came and, instead of helping her, just raided the car for everything of value in it, and also the presents in the backseat. Ran off. Ma was there fifteen or twenty minutes before anybody else came. It was late, and she wasn't on a main street. She was taken to the hospital. She got better."

Darien continued to say nothing, knowing that there was still more to it than that.

"My dad," Hobbes said, "Didn't tell me the truth, that Santa wasn't real and all that. I don't think he even gave it a thought. His wife was in the hospital, fighting for her life. Nothing else mattered. He was right, of course. But I was a kid. It wasn't that I didn't get any presents that year. It was that... I'd been told I wouldn't get presents if I was bad. I tried to think of everything I'd done for the entire year, my entire life, to figure out _why_. And then I heard about other kids that got presents, kids I knew had done bad things. You know, lied to their parents, stole candy, the sorts of crimes kids do. They all got presents. Why not me? I didn't know. And I didn't ask, because I didn't want anyone to realize what a bad kid I was. I guess I got it in my head that nobody would know I didn't get any presents if I didn't tell them, even though we always sat around the tree together to open them. But you get weird ideas when you're a kid. I didn't want anybody to know how bad I was. Especially not when I didn't know... what I'd done wrong."

He fell silent, seemingly surprised at his own confession, or perhaps by how much that old wound still hurt. Darien couldn't think of anything to say, and so he didn't say it.

"I even..." Hobbes said after a moment, a partial but humorless smile on his face as he recalled this ridiculous bit, "...I even thought maybe Ma hadn't been hit by a car, that it had actually been Santa's sleigh. Not that Santa was drunk, but that I was just so bad not giving me presents wasn't enough."

Darien swore under his breath in sympathy.

"'course, later on I found out Santa wasn't even real," Hobbes said, "But by then I'd been working so hard for so long under the belief that there was a big man watching me that I couldn't stop. I didn't even believe, and yet I still felt this fear all the time that Santa was going to see me, and if I wasn't completely perfect... he might send another drunk driver to kill my Ma."

"Ouch," Darien observed.

"Yeah," Hobbes agreed quietly.

The brief exchange seemed somehow more than adequate to express the full depth of Darien's new understanding of Hobbes in that moment. It was easy to think Hobbes had suddenly come mentally unhinged one day, courtesy of some traumatic event while he worked for the government. But Darien saw now that maybe something like that had broken the camel's back, but it had been collecting straws for a long time before then. Maybe Hobbes had never had a shot at "being right in the head," without outside aid, maybe it was just that his body didn't make the right stuff for mental stability, sort of like how a certain Gland in Darien's head made all the wrong stuff for mental stability. Or maybe too many people had hurt Hobbes during critical points along the way.

In either case, Darien saw nothing to make fun of here. He had childhood traumas of his own. And he himself had distinct memories of never being good enough. Never being smart enough. Never being talented enough. And, of course, he knew that damage the death of parents did to a kid, because it had happened to him. He could understand the fear of losing a parent, no matter how irrational that fear actually was. It was a pain he knew, and from there he understood the rest.

Ever the opportunist, Darien saw that Hobbes had, in opening up, made himself vulnerable. Easily could Darien compare recent events to this past trauma. He could point out that the true cause of the pain was Hobbes' father, who had lied to him and -in so doing- betrayed his trust. He could compare that to the trust he himself had betrayed with Nicky. But Darien did not act on that realization, because he recognized that he wouldn't be doing it to try and make Hobbes understand how he felt, he would be doing it because it was a brutally elegant means of laying on guilt.

Despite the fact that he was not so good of a person that he wasn't tempted to take that advantage for everything it was worth, Darien realized that he was trying to be, that he wanted to be a better friend.

A few months ago, Darien would not have hesitated. But a few months ago, his brother had been gunned down while saving his life. Since that time, he had met people unlike any he'd ever met before, learned things he'd never imagined were true. He wasn't who he'd been a few months ago. Sometimes he wasn't sure who he was anymore, but he knew for sure he wasn't who he'd been, and that (though he was loath to admit it to anyone) he was actually growing marginally ashamed of that person.

By this point, Darien had obtained a sitting position on the bed, still subconsciously holding a protective hand over the point where he'd been shot. Darien knew that he'd come unbearably close to death, and been saved more by chance than anything else, and that was a scary thing to realize.

For a lengthy span of time, both he and Hobbes were silent, neither knowing quite what to say.

Hobbes seemed to realize on his own what Darien had decided not to say. He didn't say as much, but Darien saw the look on his face change from sad reflection to what looked almost like dawning horror.

"Come on," Hobbes said suddenly.

Darien cocked his head, the imp of mischief that was normally his slowly reawakening as he replied, "I thought I was supposed to stay quiet at home and get some rest."

"Fawkes, I will pick you up and carry you if I have to, but I think we'd bother rather you walked."

Darien raised his eyebrows at the idea, not because he doubted Hobbes' ability to pull it off (which he didn't doubt at all), but because of the sudden commitment in his eyes, a sureness that was usually only there when he talked of government conspiracies.

"Where are we going?" Darien asked, getting up and slowly looking around for his shoes.

"Don't ask stupid questions," Hobbes replied, "Not when you already know the answer."

Darien had suspected, but not entirely been willing to believe, what Hobbes was saying. Now he understood, and felt not just relief, but a flood of gratitude that honestly surprised him so much that he couldn't think of anything to say. But he saw that he didn't have to.

Hobbes understood.


	22. A Christmas to Believe In

**_A/N:_** ** _Thank you all for reading (and reviewing), Merry Christmas and I hope you enjoy the final chapter of this story._ **

* * *

Darien had been somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness at the time, and so he had been absent when Nicky was delivered home to his mother. He had not met Nicky's father at all. It seemed strange to go back to the Shepherd house when there really wasn't a good reason for it. Not only had Nicky been returned, Hobbes had already come by for a followup visit to let the family know that all the people involved had not only been arrested, but that they were staying arrested.

Of course sooner or later it was liable to wind up in court, but not really. There were too many government secrets that needed to stay secret. By the time there was a courtroom scene, everything would already have been decided behind closed doors, including what the public was going to be shown. Because obviously you couldn't out former secret agents like Rosemary Shepherd without painting a target on their backs, and you couldn't give full details of the involvement of people like Darien Fawkes without revealing current secret agents, not to mention secret technology.

Because he didn't have a decent excuse for why he was there, Darien started to feel increasingly uncomfortable about it, such that he implored Hobbes to just keep driving instead of stopping in front of the house. Maybe it was also a little about the sudden memory of the dog that lived here.

"Don't be ridiculous, Fawkes," Hobbes said, stopping the van, "You saved their kid. They'll be ecstatic to see you. Promise. Now come on," he got out of the van, but Darien hesitated to follow.

Hobbes had actually come around the side of the van before Darien moved.

Evidently impatient, Hobbes stuck his head through the open window of the van, sternly commanding, "Get out of the van, Fawkes."

Obedient, but sulking about it, Darien got out of the van and followed Hobbes up the walk, head down partially in an expression of reluctance but also a refusal to acknowledge any of the Christmas decorations on either side. He had one hand in the pocket of his jacket, the other was through a sling to take the pressure off the bullet wound in his arm, though really that didn't hurt much worse than anything else. The majority of the bruising Darien had sustained was hidden from view by the jacket, but what he couldn't hide was the stiffness with which he moved, which was not purposely affected for sympathy or as a silent expression of rebellion.

Hobbes ignored Darien's reticence and general slowness, and went ahead of him up to the door of the abode and rang the bell, perhaps intending to get the occupants' of the house out here before Darien lost his nerve and went Saran-wrap on him.

In truth, Darien was perplexed by his own embarrassed reluctance, as if he had some shameful or dishonest reason for visiting the Shepherds. Even if both of those things were true, it was not his typical nature to worry about such things. Not if there was some reason he wanted to be there.

Absurdly, he remembered the way his now ex-girlfriend Casey had looked at him when she found the truth of who he was. He had loved her at first sight, more than he'd ever expected he could love another person, but of course you don't lead the invitation to a date by saying you're a thief. And, once he got to know her, he'd known she was a better person than he could ever hope to be, and that she would never accept him as he was. It was something he had avoided thinking about, but a war had begun to rage inside him, even before he was caught, as he realized that he would have to tell her the truth because she deserved that, needed that, but if he did he would lose her. His own self interest led him to continue the life of crime unabated, even as he knew the answer would be to change his ways. He hadn't wanted to, and his love of Casey hadn't been enough to trump his own self-love. It might have been eventually, but now he would never know.

What he did know was how it felt when someone he adored looked at him like he was... well... a criminal. It was a different sort of relationship, of course, but then Casey had been a nurse for kids, so there was a tieback there. But during their captivity and escape, Darien had developed a fondness for Nicky, and they'd developed a trust. A trust Darien had broken.

Ridiculous as it seemed, Darien felt sure that Nicky's parents would be able to see his guilt, and that they would look at him in the same way Casey had. Surely Nicky wouldn't be happy to see him. It was true that Darien had done the best he could think of with what he'd had, but Nicky couldn't know that, any more than Casey could understand just what drove Darien to be a thief (not that he could have explained it if she'd let him), or believe him when he insisted that the charge of assault and molestation of a senior citizen was flatly false. He'd lied to her too many times. Regardless of what the ultimate truth was, who could forgive something like that?

With Nicky, it had been a smaller thing, a necessary thing, and not out of Darien's own self-centeredness either. But from Nicky's perception, the crime must be just the same, or perhaps even greater. It was a matter of a one-year-old and his toy. And not only a toy, but the only one that had been in the room, the strange room full of strangers. The one good thing in Nicky's life, and Darien had taken it. And then he'd run off, leaving Nicky alone with a terrible, frightening sound that the boy had probably envisioned as a horrifying monster coming to eat him or something.

Who could forgive something like _that_?

But before Darien could decide to make a break for it, the Rottweiler puppy was barking at the door, and the Shepherds were answering it, and Hobbes was talking to them and gesturing back to Darien, who'd just reached the first of the porch steps, and there was no turning back after that.

Darien remembered something that had earlier mystified him with regards to the puppy, and that sufficiently distracted him from his glum thoughts of the reception he was likely to receive here.

To his surprise and bafflement, The Shepherds welcomed him warmly on being informed that Darien was the one who had ultimately found their boy and been injured protecting him.

Joe Shepherd was a broad shouldered man about Darien's height, handsomely entering into middle age with thick, black hair that had not yet begun to silver, and dark, expressive eyes. He immediately insisted on shaking Darien's hand while Mrs. Shepherd invited both Darien and Hobbes into the house. Joe Shepherd clearly wanted also to clap Darien on the shoulder as he came across the threshold, but forbore to do that for fear of hurting him.

Feeling unnaturally and painfully shy in a way he wasn't sure how to respond to, Darien dared only to briefly look the Shepherds in the eyes, but mostly looked anywhere else but at them. Anywhere else, he was immediately reminded, was covered with Christmas décor, much of it religious. That only served to heighten Darien's discomfort as the feeling of being watched by an otherworldly presence descended on him. He didn't understand why he should feel this way, because he hadn't done anything wrong.

Not lately, anyway.

Diesel, the Rottweiler pup, seemed to sense this quiet distress of the guest. He remembered, of course, tackling Darien and taking him down on the stairs. He also remembered the scolding he had received for doing so. And he remembered to the sacred Guest Law, which forbade the menacing of any approved visitors. Beyond which, he sensed nothing amiss about Darien, no impression that Darien was being sneaky, only that he was desperately unhappy. Being only a puppy, Diesel actually rather wanted everyone to be friends with him, and his attunement to the moods of humanity -typical of most canines- made him certain that this particular person might be a good friend if he could be distracted from his melancholy. The pup, with simple dog logic, felt that unhappiness was best alleviated by a lively romp, and he bounced off unnoticed to retrieve a stuffed toy.

By the time everyone was in the living room and seated, the dog had returned, carrying a floppy green rabbit by its ears. He stood in front of Darien with it and, when Darien did not respond, he shook his vehemently, as if trying to show Darien how to play. He presented the object again.

Only at this point did the Shepherds seem to notice Darien's quietness and discomfort with the situation, and they immediately assumed the dog was the cause. After all, Diesel _had_ bitten Darien on his last visit to the house, and that was liable to make anyone edgy about coming back.

"Diez," Mrs. Shepherd spoke imperiously to the dog, "Hier."

The pup, eager to obey the familiar command, ever pleased to show off in front of guests and perhaps hoping the command might be followed by another, or maybe a game with the beloved floppy bunny, abandoned his endeavor to cheer up the guest and turned to his mistress. He trotted over and sat, bobbing his head, trying to proffer the bunny without actually forcing it onto Mrs. Shepherd.

"Platz," Mrs. Shepherd commanded, and the dog instantly dropped into a lying down position at her feet, looking up at her grinningly from around his mouthful of bunny and wiggling his short tail.

For a few minutes, there was general talk, which Darien was only half paying attention to. It wasn't really the typical exchange of pleasantries, though Darien realized that it was effectively the secret agent version of that. It was immediately clear to him that Joe was aware of his wife's former occupation, and that he was too wise to ask questions she would be forced to evade. Darien wondered what it would be like to have someone trust him that way. Then he wondered what it would be like to trust someone that way. Was he even capable of that? He wondered.

To avoid thinking about it, he decided to ask the question that had initially bothered him.

"How come the dog didn't notice when Nicky was kidnapped?" he asked.

"Rod Harriot came about a week before," Mrs. Shepherd answered, sounding almost embarrassed, but mostly a bit angry, "He said he'd realized what he'd done was wrong, and he wanted to let me know that he was sorry and that he understood why I did what I did back then," she shook her head, "I knew him better than that, but I let myself believe..." she sighed, "Anyway, he met Diez then. He knows dogs, and he wasted no time making Diez fond of him by being friendly and asking to give him treats. I let him do that. Diez is only a puppy, and so of course he was instantly won over by some pieces of chicken and a few games of fetch with his favorite bunny. When Rod came back, Diez probably didn't think anything of it, assuming he was as welcome as the babysitter or the housekeeper."

"Well I see now where I went wrong last time I was here," Darien said, managing a feeble laugh, "I should've had chicken in my pocket."

The talk started to drift, but then there came a cry from upstairs.

"Sounds like Nicky woke up from his name," Mrs. Shepherd observed.

"I'll go get him," Joe suggested.

"Uh, this may sound weird," Darien broke in abruptly, "But... would you mind if I went and got him?"

Joe looked at his wife, who nodded her assent, before he said, "Sure."

Darien nodded, almost more to himself than anything, but didn't move for a moment.

"You forget something, partner?" Hobbes asked, and from the pocket of his jacket he withdrew a small object which turned out to be the truck, which he explained, "We found it in the room with Nicky. Thought maybe he might like it back."

Without speaking, afraid that words would betray him, Darien took the truck, and went upstairs. It felt like a long trip, by himself, carrying the truck which seemed unnaturally heavy. He realized that, however absurdly, he was actually afraid to face Nicky again.

Darien knew that to anybody else it would seem stupid, but it didn't seem that way to him.

It seemed all the less so when he actually entered Nicky's room via the open door. The kid was sitting in his crib. He'd quit fussing to get out as soon as he'd heard someone on the stairs. He seemed to regard Darien with momentary suspicion, perhaps remembering his kidnapper coming in and taking him away, and perhaps having found that entire experience rather unpleasant.

Darien hesitated in the doorway. Idiotically, he quicksilvered the truck, then came hesitantly to the crib and held out his apparently empty hand palm up. He didn't know exactly what he was hoping for, but he felt like it was impossible, whatever it was. Nicky looked at the empty hand, then at Darien's face..

"Hey," Darien said quietly, his brow unconsciously furrowed with worry, "I know you don't speak English so good yet, but I wanted to tell you... I'm sorry. I know I don't deserve it, heck, I'm not even sure you know what it is... but I was hoping... you could forgive me."

He wanted out of the crib, but something else seemed to be on offer. He could have simply fussed, demanding to have his wants met rather than playing this strange game that was being presented. He could have cried at sight of his betrayer. He could have done any number of things.

But what he actually did was reach out a slow, questing hand, just as if he understood exactly what Darien had, even though he could not see it. When his hand touched the truck, Darien shattered the quicksilver coating, making it visible. Gravely, Nicky looked up from the truck, and at Darien's face.

Then he smiled. Giggling, Nicky lifted the truck in his hand, held up both arms and so asked to be picked up. If there had ever been a surer sign of forgiveness, Darien had never seen it. The relief that flooded through him rendered him almost too shaky to pick Nicky up with his good arm.

"Come on, Nicky," Darien said, returning the smile of his small friend, "Let's go see your folks."

* * *

 _At the beginning of a story about a favorite dog named Lad, a prolific author of the early twentieth century named Albert Payson Terhune wrote, "_ _Some proverbs live because they are too true to die. Others endure because they have a smug sound and nobody has bothered to bury them."_

 _In describing Lad, Terhune always said the dog was, "thoroughbred in body and soul." I always thought that was kind of strange, because the real life dog on which these fictional yarns were based had no known pedigree. Even if he did look like a collie you couldn't prove it, any more than you can prove a dog has a soul._

 _But that day with Nicky, I finally understood. I'll never know who the birth parents of Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd really were, and I don't know what the future holds for him._

 _But I do know that, to me, he'll always be Saint Nick._

 _So... Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night._

 _-Darien Fawkes_


End file.
